LIBRARY 

UNJVERSUY  01    c 
UAY13 


*.  A 


THE 

NEGRO  AND  HIS  NEEDS 

By 

RAYMOND  PATTERSON 


WITH    A    FOREWORD 
BY 

WILLIAM   HOWARD   TAFT 


NEW  YORK  CHICAGO  TORONTO 

Fleming    H.   Revell    Company 

LONDON         AND         EDINBURGH 


LIBRARY 

il  Y  QF  (    vLIFORNtA 
D/W1S 


Copyright,  1911,  by 
FLEMING  H.  REVELL  COMPANY 


New  York:  158  Fifth  Avenue 
Chicago:  125  N.  Wabash  Ave. 
Toronto:  25  Richmond  St.,  W. 
London :  21  Paternoster  Square 
Edinburgh:  100  Princes  Street 


FOREWORD 

Raymond  Patterson  was  a  classmate  of  mine 
at  Yale.  For  years  he  was  a  leader  among  the 
newspaper  correspondents  at  Washington.  He  was 
a  man  of  great  ability  and  showed  it  in  his  college 
life.  He  became  a  trained  journalist.  He  was  an 
earnest  and  close  observer,  and  a  conscientious  his 
torian.  He  was  possessed  of  a  judicial  mind,  and 
it  manifested  itself  in  his  treatment  of  what  he  saw. 
He  was  a  man  of  wide  interests.  The  problems 
that  the  country  has  before  it  for  solution  com 
manded  his  close  attention,  not  as  a  mere  recorder 
of  events,  but  as  one  who,  by  his  suggestion  and 
clear  statement  of  the  facts,  could  aid  their  solution. 

The  following  pages  are  the  result  of  his  in 
vestigations  into  conditions  surrounding  the  negro 
question  at  the  South.  They  are  full  of  interest  for 
every  one  who  believes  that  this  question  is  the  most 
serious,  facing  the  American  people.  One  need  not 
concur  in  the  conclusions  which  Mr.  Patterson 
draws,  to  appreciate  the  value  of  the  work  he  has 
done.  He  has  been  painstaking  and  conscientious. 
He  has  made  his  story  most  readable. 


PREFACE 

The  Southern  man  is  too  close  to  the  negro  and 
the  Northern  man  too  far  away.  Somewhere  be 
tween  these  two  widely  different  points  of  view 
must  be  found  ultimately  the  solution  of  the  negro 
problem. 

At  the  present  time  that  problem  is  so  complex, 
it  has  so  many  curious  ramifications,  it  involves  so 
many  side  issues,  it  concerns  such  vast  interests  for 
the  welfare  of  mankind  itself,  that  it  should  be  ap 
proached  with  great  deliberation.  The  adjustment 
of  the  relations  between  the  black  race  and  the 
white  in  America  cannot  be  a  matter  of  years,  or 
even  of  generations,  but  of  centuries.  In  the  mean 
time,  however,  it  is  of  vast  importance  to  the  coun 
try,  as  steps  toward  the  ultimate  solution,  to  solve 
some  of  the  temporary  problems  regarding  the  col 
oured  race — problems  of  education,  of  racial  devel 
opment,  of  political  and  economic  status,  above  all, 
of  methods  of  intellectual  and  moral  culture  by 
which  the  negro  shall  be  helped  to  rise  from  his 
present  low  plane  to  a  higher.  With  some  of  these 
problems  it  is  the  purpose  of  this  book  to  deal. 

9 


REVISED    BY 
MRS.    RAYMOND    PATTERSON 

FROM    LETTERS    ORIGINALLY 
PUBLISHED    IN 

THE    CHICAGO    TRIBUNE 


CONTENTS 

THE  COMPLEX  PROBLEM 

PAGE 

I.     THE  PROBLEM  OF  INCREASE       .         .         .15 

II.     THE  PROBLEM  OF  TEMPERAMENT        .         .  23 

III.  THE  MULATTO 32 

IV.  THE  PROBLEM  OF  IMMORALITY  ...  41 
V.     THE  PROBLEM  OF  ENVIRONMENT        .         .  54 

A    STUDY  OF  EXISTING   CONDITIONS 

I.     THE   ECONOMIC    PROBLEM   IN   THE   BLACK 

BELT 75 

II.     WHERE     THE     WHITE     PLANTER    Is    THE 

NEGRO'S  FRIEND 91 

III.  THE  POLITICAL  ISSUE         ....  107 

IV.  VARYING  VIEWS  ON  THE  SUFFRAGE  QUES 

TION        125 

THE  SOLUTION 

I.     WHAT    THE    NEGRO    HAS   DONE    FOR  THE 

NEGRO .  133 

II.     THE  SOUTHERNER'S  POINT  OF  VIEW          .  149 

III.  THEORIES  OF  SOLUTION      ....  159 

IV.  WHAT  KIND  OF  EDUCATION  ?    .         .         .  175 
V.     THE  GREAT  NEED 192 

DEDUCTIONS 


THE  COMPLEX  PROBLEM 


The  Problem  of  Increase 

THE  problem  of  numerical  increase  or  diminu 
tion  of  the  negro  race  in  America  is  of  vital 
importance  in  relation  to  the  question  of 
their  ultimate  destiny.  Are  the  black  people 
to  go  on  increasing  under  the  present  aggravated 
conditions,  thus  rendering  the  situation  more  acute? 
Or,  on  the  other  hand,  will  they  gradually  be  elim 
inated,  either  by  the  working  of  ordinary  physical 
laws,  or  by  the  slow  process  of  amalgamation? 

Throughout  the  Southern  States  there  has  been 
a  great  disregard  of  the  important  work  of  keeping 
vital  statistics,  and  people  who  are  well  informed 
on  other  subjects  take  it  for  granted  that,  because 
the  negro  is  outclassing  the  whites  in  point  of  num 
bers  in  certain  localities,  his  race  is  growing  faster 
than  that  of  his  former  masters.  It  is  necessary  to 
go  to  the  cities  for  anything  like  accurate  figures; 
and  these  do  not  sustain  the  view  that  the  negroes 
are  growing  in  numbers,  substantially  and  generally, 
faster  than  the  whites. 

All  the  Southern  States  are  peculiar,  owing  to  the 
fact  that  there  is  practically  no  foreign  immigration 

15 


16  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

in  that  section  of  the  country.  There  are  a  few  of 
the  southern  European  immigrants,  notably  the 
agricultural  Italians,  who  could  probably  succeed  in 
the  South  and  make  money,  but  they  do  not  like 
to  be  placed  in  direct  competition  with  the  black 
man,  and  thus  far  have  not  entered  the  South  in  any 
large  numbers.  The  result  is  that  the  numerical 
relations  of  the  two  races  are  largely  dependent  in 
the  South  merely  upon  the  natural  ebb  and  flow  of 
humanity,  caused  by  the  inevitable  processes  of 
birth  and  death. 

It  so  happens  that  in  the  city  of  Charleston  an 
intelligent  system  of  vital  statistics  has  been 
adopted,  which  has  a  direct  bearing  upon  the  race 
question.  The  figures  show  that  while  the  negro 
is  reproducing  himself  much  more  rapidly  than  the 
white,  he  is  subjected  to  the  usual  great  law  of  com 
pensation,  owing  to  the  fact  that  his  death  rate  is 
also  nearly  double  that  of  the  white  man.  For  ex 
ample,  in  one  given  year  the  mortality  among  the 
whites  was  at  the  rate  of  one  in  fifty-two  of  the 
population,  as  against  one  in  twenty-seven  among 
the  negroes.  And  this  is  by  no  means  the  highest 
proportion  among  the  records  of  negro  death  rates 
in  that  city.  Of  course,  if  such  a  death  rate  as  this 
were  the  whole  of  the  problem,  the  coloured  race 
would  soon  disappear,  and  the  solution  of  the  race 
question  would  be  merely  a  matter  of  patience  on 
the  part  of  the  whites. 


The  Problem  of  Increase  17 

The  extraordinary  mortality  among  the  children 
of  the  negroes  is  something  pitiful  to  contemplate. 
In  the  case  of  the  figures  just  quoted,  of  the  total 
of  1,153  riegro  deaths  in  the  year  referred  to,  no 
less  than  391,  or  about  one-third,  were  children 
under  five  years  of  age.  Between  five  and  ten  the 
mortality  is  extremely  small,  the  heaviest  death  rate, 
aside  from  that  of  the  little  children,  falling  be 
tween  twenty  and  forty  years.  The  negro  children 
are  born  into  the  world  with  a  large  percentage  of 
malformation;  they  are  grossly  neglected,  suffer 
often  from  diseases  of  the  eyes,  and  too  often  in 
herit  from  diseased  parents  maladies  such  as  their 
forefathers  never  knew  in  the  barbaric  wilds  of 
Africa. 

A  further  study  of  the  mortality  statistics  of 
Charleston,  which  is  thoroughly  representative  of 
the  coast  cities  of  the  South,  develops  the  fact  that 
the  great  negro  death  rate  is  from  diseases  directly 
traceable  to  improper  food  and  unsanitary  surround 
ings  and  associations.  The  negro,  not  only  in  the 
cities  but  everywhere  else,  is  notoriously  ignorant  of 
the  most  ordinary  laws  of  health,  and  seems  to  have 
reduced  uncleanliness  to  a  fine  art.  Trained  students 
of  vital  statistics  and  all  physicians  will  appreciate 
the  fact  that  the  negro  is  a  tropical  importation,  and 
is  in  consequence  immediately  subjected  to  fatal  af 
fections  of  the  throat  and  lungs.  His  natural  pre 
disposition  is  accentuated  by  the  fact  that  he  dresses 


i8  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

himself  improperly,  takes  but  little  care  of  his  health, 
heeds  no  warnings,  and  is  frequently  content  in 
the  way  of  medical  attention  with  efforts  based  on 
the  grossest  superstitions  of  his  race.  In  the  total 
of  1,153  deaths  already  quoted,  the  principal  items 
of  negro  mortality  show  that  tuberculosis  was  re 
sponsible  for  177  deaths.  Pneumonia  claimed  95; 
Bright's  disease,  128;  apoplexy,  23;  enteritis,  59; 
entero-colitis,  41;  marasmus,  56;  typhoid  fever, 
31 ;  malarial  fever,  25.  It  is  therefore  immediately 
evident  that  much  of  the  enormous  death  rate  among 
the  negroes  in  the  South  is  not  climatic,  but  is  the 
result  of  unhygienic  personal  habits  and  ignorance 
or  utter  disregard  of  the  basic  laws  of  health,  com 
bined  with  a  racial  predisposition.  It  naturally  fol 
lows  that  if  the  negro  could  be  taught  to  take  care 
of  himself  (which  many  wise  people  believe  to  be 
impossible),  the  death  rate  among  his  race  ought  to 
drop  down  marvellously  in  the  Southern  States. 

When  one  turns  to  the  list  of  births,  an  equally 
startling  and  significant  condition  of  affairs  is  at 
once  discovered.  The  negro  is  reproducing  himself, 
if  the  Charleston  figures  can  be  believed,  at  an  ex 
traordinary  rate,  which  has  thus  far  proved  sufficient 
to  offset  the  high  mortality  brought  about  by  his 
ignorant  defiance  of  the  laws  of  hygiene.  The  negro 
population  of  Charleston  is  in  the  relation  of  about 
four  to  three  to  that  of  the  whites.  Instead  of  the 
bi»*th  rate  being  in  the  same  proportion,  however, 


The  Problem  of  Increase  19 

it  is  found  to  be  more  than  double  that  of  the 
whites.  The  city  of  Charleston  itself  is  not  making 
any  growth,  but  it  will  readily  be  seen  that  if  the 
negro  keeps  up  his  present  gait  in  the  way  of  add 
ing  to  the  population,  and  at  the  same  time  becomes 
educated  enough  to  avoid  deaths  caused  by  mere 
filth  and  lack  of  proper  attention  to  health,  the  pro 
portion  between  the  blacks  and  the  whites  will  be 
altered  for  the  worse,  and  the  aristocratic  old  cradle 
of  the  Confederacy  will  be  turned  over  to  the  race 
of  those  who  were  originally  its  servants.  And 
from  other  equally  reliable  figures  is  ascertained  the 
striking  fact  that  the  negroes  are  increasing  in  the 
cities  of  the  South,  except  in  Washington,  at  a  per 
ceptibly  faster  rate  than  the  whites. 

Another  point  to  be  taken  into  consideration  is 
the  small  but  steady  drift  of  the  negroes  both  from 
country  and  city  toward  the  North.  The  movement 
is  not  a  large  one,  from  the  point  of  view  of  those 
who  are  accustomed  to  deal  with  the  statistics  of 
foreign  immigration  in  this  country,  yet  it  has  its 
own  significance.  For  at  every  point  in  the  South, 
most  particularly  in  the  purely  agricultural  sections, 
one  hears  the  almost  continual  complaint,  which  at 
certain  seasons  of  the  year  becomes  strident,  of  the 
lack  of  labour.  Hundreds  and  hundreds  of  thou 
sands  of  acres  of  good  land  in  the  Southern  States 
lie  ready  for  the  plough;  but  there  is  no  man  to 
hold  it.  And  this  lack  of  labour  is  not  being  re- 


2O  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

duced,  as  is  the  case  in  the  North,  by  a  constant 
stream  of  foreign  immigration. 

There  is,  and  every  planter  knows  it,  a  little  trick 
ling  stream  of  darkies  going  day  by  day,  more  often 
night  by  night,  away  from  the  warm,  moist  fields, 
into  the  dark,  dank,  degraded  hovels  of  the  cities. 
The  negro  drifts  off  in  ones  and  twos  and  half- 
dozens  down  the  rivers  and  along  the  lines  of  the 
railroads.  This  movement  is  no  more  intelligent 
than  anything  else  the  negro  does.  It  is  not  even 
intuitive,  because  the  agricultural  negro  in  the  South 
is  pretty  well  off,  if  he  did  but  know  it.  So  the 
country  negro  drifts  to  the  city,  and  being  uncouth 
and  unskilled  to  a  degree  not  appreciated  by  North 
ern  people,  he  finds  his  first  employment  in  the  most 
menial  and  the  hardest  labour  we  have. 

The  children  of  this  agricultural  negro,  however, 
are  city  born  and  bred,  and  they  learn  to  get  places 
a  little  bit  better  than  their  "  dad  "  was  satisfied 
with.  Some  of  them  become  bricklayers,  carpenters, 
wheelwrights,  and  engage  in  similar  skilled  occupa 
tions,  which  bring  to  them  good  wages  but  no  more 
prosperity  as  a  rule,  because,  with  the  negro,  pros 
perity  is  not  generally  measured  by  the  amount  of 
his  wages.  From  the  city  negro  there  gradually 
grows  up  a  little  more  cultivated  class,  among  whom 
one  will  find  a  large  percentage  of  the  mixed  blood, 
which  seeks  occupations  directly  on  the  railroads. 

I  have  found  from  talks  with  humble  but  intelli- 


The  Problem  of  Increase  21 

gent  coloured  people  that  there  is  a  general  tendency 
northward  among  this  class,  which  is  perhaps  as  yet 
imperceptible  to  the  white  people.  That  is  to  say, 
a  Pullman  porter  who  has  run  from  New  Orleans 
to  Mobile  will  after  a  limited  time  work  his  way 
into  a  run  from  Mobile  to  Montgomery,  and  then 
to  Atlanta  or  Chattanooga,  the  end  of  his  run  being 
evidently  a  little  further  north  with  every  change 
he  makes.  In  this  way,  they  tell  me,  the  railroad 
negroes  are  shifting  North  slowly  but  surely  day 
by  day,  and  in  the  only  way  they  could  do  it  with 
out  directly  buying  a  ticket  and  moving  wife  and 
family. 

When  I  asked  the  coloured  people  themselves  for 
an  explanation  as  to  this  northward  movement 
among  the  railway  class,  it  was  at  least  noticeable 
that  all  questions  of  politics  were  immediately  elim 
inated.  Most  of  them  seem  to  have  but  vague  ideas 
on  the  ballot,  and  I  firmly  believe  that  the  Southern 
negro,  however  it  may  be  with  his  Northern 
brother,  cares  but  little  for  the  franchise,  except  as 
he  might  care  to  have  any  bit  of  collateral.  The 
invariable  answer  to  my  inquiries  as  to  why  the 
coloured  people  want  to  get  North  was  the  state 
ment  that  the  tips  were  larger  and  more  frequent 
than  in  the  South. 

These  observations  in  the  South  are  corroborated 
by  the  figures  in  regard  to  the  increase  of  the  negro 
population  in  the  North,  not  only  in  the  southern 


22  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

Middle  States,  where  the  race  riots  and  struggles 
most  frequently  occur,  but  in  New  England  and  the 
Northwest.  Is  there,  then,  a  possibility  that  at  some 
time  more  or  less  remote  the  race  question  will 
transfer  itself,  with  all  its  complexities,  from  the 
cotton  plantations  of  the  South  to  the  coal  mines 
and  wheat  fields  of  the  North? 


II 

The  Problem  of  Temperament 

PROBABLY  no  white  man  ever  did  or  ever 
will  fathom  the  depths  and  the  shallows  of 
the  real  negro's  character  and  disposition. 
One  frequently  hears  Southern  people  who  have 
been  "  raised "  by  old-time  mammies  and  who 
played  in  childhood  with  little  black  companions  say 
with  despairing  frankness,  "  I've  been  watching  the 
negro  all  these  years,  but  I  don't  know  him  any 
better  now  than  I  did  in  the  first  place."  Surely 
if  the  Southerners  admit  that  the  negro  is  a  mys 
tery  to  them,  growing  no  more  intelligible  as  the 
days  go  by,  Northern  people  must  be  prepared  for 
many  race  traits  which  cannot  be  accounted  for  by 
ordinary  theorists. 

The  fact  that  seems  generally  forgotten  by  white 
people  both  North  and  South  is  that  the  negro  is 
of  a  childhood  race.  The  dark  continent  of  Africa 
was  evidently  passed  by  in  the  march  of  civiliza 
tion,  and  while  the  Caucasian  and  Mongolian  races 
were  striving  painfully  upward,  the  black  race  re 
mained  painfully  near  the  starting-point.  According 
to  the  judgment  of  those  who  have  most  conscien- 

23 


24  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

tiously  studied  the  negro — planters,  officers  of  the 
law,  philanthropists,  school-teachers,  negroes  them 
selves — it  is  unfair  even  to  consider  the  black  man 
in  America  except  always  in  the  light  of  the  fact 
that  the  most  enlightened  representatives  of  his  race 
are  only  a  few  generations  away  from  actual  bar 
barism,  while  the  great  mass  of  the  blacks,  em 
bracing  many  millions  of  men,  women,  and  chil 
dren,  is  still  far  lower  in  the  social  and  mental  scale 
than  were  the  shepherds  of  Chaldea  in  the  days  of 
Abraham. 

Whenever  a  Southerner  starts  in  to  justify  the 
current  local  treatment  of  the  negro,  it  is  always  by 
dwelling  upon  the  bad  qualities  of  the  black  man. 
And  indeed  even  a  casual  observation  must  convince 
a  fair-minded  person  that  almost  any  of  the  South 
ern  negroes,  left  to  themselves,  will  pilfer  small 
articles,  will  lie  in  the  most  inconsequential  manner, 
and  will  develop  traits  which  seem  to  justify  their 
classification  as  downright  savages.  The  average 
Southern  negro  is  shiftless  and  improvident ;  he  can 
not  save  and  he  cannot  anticipate.  He  has  but  few 
domestic  ties,  and  in  these  few  he  shifts  his  allegi 
ance  with  rare  facility.  He  is  gifted  in  the  matter 
of  intemperance,  when  he  gets  a  chance,  and  as  for 
immorality,  that  of  the  original  negro  is  so  cath 
olic,  so  all  pervasive  that  it  cannot  well  be  described. 

If  one  looks  lower,  at  the  most  debased  class  of 
negroes,  there  are  still  blacker  pictures  to  be  painted, 


The  Problem  of  Temperament        25 

whose  colours  can  be  laid  on  with  sombre  horror 
and  with  entire  fidelity  to  truth.  Here  responsi 
bility  for  human  life  is  not  even  understood,  and 
they  kill  each  other  for  trivial  causes.  When  ar 
raigned  for  the  crime  of  murder  they  will  admit 
the  killing,  but  will  assign  reasons  for  it  so  ex 
travagantly  childish  as  to  make  one  doubt  whether 
the  reasons  are  not  cunningly  invented  to  hide  with 
a  veil  of  innocence  a  deeper  tragedy.  In  one  little 
country  town  the  district  attorney  has  on  the  aver 
age  one  case  a  week,  during  the  season  when  the 
court  is  in  session,  of  a  negro  murdering  another 
negro.  It  is  not  hard  to  find  the  blackest  and  most 
savage  of  crimes,  infanticide,  incest  of  most  com 
plicated  character,  and  other  offences  committed 
only  by  savages. 

This  dismal  calendar  of  crime  shows  an  extreme 
point  of  view  in  regard  to  the  immorality  and  crim 
inality  of  the  negro;  true,  because  painted  by  those 
who  ought  to  know  him  best,  and  who  in  fact 
make  more  allowances  for  his  failures  than  do  those 
who  know  him  least.  Yet  when  one  begins  to 
analyze  this  extreme  condition,  it  is  at  once  easy 
to  see,  aside  from  mere  race  prejudice,  that  the 
negro  is  no  better  and  no  worse  than  any  other 
savage.  His  sins  of  immorality,  shocking  to  so 
many,  are  the  sins  of  the  untutored  animal.  He 
has  as  many  domestic  ties  as  the  noblest  horse  or 
the  most  faithful  dog.  He  will  pilfer,  just  as  a 


26  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

highly  bred  dog  will  occasionally  steal  a  piece  of 
meat  from  a  butcher's  block ;  he  will  tell  foolish  lies 
as  a  little  child  does,  partially  through  fright,  par 
tially  through  a  low  species  of  barbaric  cunning, 
but  oftenest  through  downright  ignorance. 

You  can  go  anywhere  into  the  South  where  the 
negro  is  most  himself  and  find  the  Southern  people 
themselves  lauding  to  the  skies  the  absolute  fidelity 
of  the  "  ole-time  "  negro.  Now,  the  "  ole-time  " 
negro  was  nothing  more  or  less  than  the  African 
savage  or  the  son  of  a  savage,  forced  to  work  at 
the  command  of  a  white  man  who  had  been  for  five 
thousand  years  his  superior.  To-day,  everywhere 
in  the  South,  there  are  trusts  reposed  in  poor  ig 
norant  negroes  who  can  neither  read  nor  write,  and 
those  trusts  are  seldom  if  ever  betrayed.  Go  where 
you  will,  and  you  can  find  the  white  planter  putting 
up  a  sack  of  corn  to  pay  his  negroes  in  the  field, 
and  sending  it  out  alone  and  unprotected  in  the  cus 
tody  of  a  black  man  astride  of  a  mule.  In  all  the 
lynchings,  none  is  ever  provoked  by  a  breach  of 
trust  on  the  part  of  the  humble  negro. 

The  negroes  are  not  treacherous;  they  do  not,  in 
emulation  of  the  Indian  or  of  the  Irish  peasant, 
take  pot-shots  at  harsh  and  hated  landlords  from 
behind  wayside  hedges.  After  a  century  of  horri 
ble  slavery,  the  black  man  in  America  never  made 
the  slightest  attempt  to  destroy  his  former  master. 
The  negro  is  a  good  worker.  His  mind  works 


The  Problem  of  Temperament        27 

slowly,  as  a  matter  of  course,  but  he  imitates  rap 
idly  and  successfully.  Unfortunately,  he  has  imi 
tated  some  of  the  vices  of  the  white  man,  and  some 
of  the  counts  in  the  indictment  against  the  negro 
should  really  be  charged  to  the  superior  race,  from 
whom  he  borrowed  them. 

There  are  strange  limitations  to  the  original  negro 
mind,  but  in  the  ultimate  analysis  these  limitations 
will  be  found  inherent  in  any  race  which  is  in  the 
childhood  condition  as  regards  the  world  at  large. 
The  negro  appears  to  bear  but  slight  resentment  to 
ill  treatment,  but  on  the  other  hand  it  is  difficult 
to  arouse  in  him  a  continuing  sense  of  real  grati 
tude.  Both  of  these  failures  in  his  mental  grasp 
can  readily  be  traced  to  his  lack  of  a  trained  mem 
ory.  He  forgets  in  the  morning  the  favour  done 
him  the  night  before,  but  he  is  equally  forgetful 
of  the  injury  done  at  the  same  time. 

A  faithful  study  of  these  characteristics  should 
convince  any  one  that  they  are  essentially  similar 
to  the  mental  grasp  of  a  little  child  who  has  not 
learned  the  world,  who  cannot  readily  distinguish 
friend  from  foe,  who  frequently  conceives  himself 
to  be  injured  when  things  are  being  done  for  his 
own  good,  and  who  will  forget  his  delight  of  the 
morning  in  his  distaste  of  the  afternoon.  Yet  in 
spite  of  this  obvious  likeness,  it  is  an  impressive 
fact  that  all  through  the  hospitable  Southland  are 
men  and  women  of  culture  who  declare  in  all  good 


28  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

faith,  backing  up  their  declaration  with  some  spe 
cious  argument,  that  the  negro  is  hopeless,  that 
education  of  any  kind  spoils  him,  and  that  he  is  a 
satisfactory  part  of  the  mechanism  of  the  world 
only  when  he  is  most  nearly  a  downright  barbarian. 

Now  if  the  negro  cannot  be  bettered  by  a  rea 
sonable  process  of  education,  if  his  unmorality  and 
his  animalism  cannot  be  dissipated  by  patient  care 
and  wise  instruction,  our  own  civilization  is  a  fail 
ure.  The  negro  must  be  developed  mentally  and 
morally  and  his  development  must  come  by  contact 
with  the  whites,  a  contact  which  in  the  present  state 
of  things  hardly  exists.  For  example,  I  know  one 
plantation  where  one  man,  the  white  superintendent, 
occupied  the  great  house  in  solitary  magnificence, 
with  five  hundred  and  fifty  negroes  under  him.  So 
far  as  I  could  learn,  there  was  not  a  school  on  that 
plantation;  if  there  was,  I  did  not  see  it  and  no 
one  mentioned  it.  The  sole  impulse  toward  civiliza 
tion  for  half  a  thousand  negroes  lay  in  the  uncon 
scious  and  oftentimes  unguarded  influence  of  a 
solitary  white  man,  who  wras  by  no  means  of  a  high 
grade,  from  an  educational  standpoint,  though  so 
cially  a  courteous,  affable  gentleman. 

The  negro,  as  I  have  come  to  believe,  is  not  at 
present  capable  of  any  high  degree  of  education, 
except  in  a  few  isolated  cases.  But  it  is  preposter 
ous  and  out  of  harmony  with  the  broad  scheme  of 
American  government  to  assert  that  the  negro  must 


The  Problem  of  Temperament        29 

be  left  just  where  he  was  when  he  came  from 
Africa,  or  that  he  becomes  contaminated  and  de 
generated  by  contact  with  the  whites.  Nothing 
could  be  farther  from  the  truth.  Every  little  school- 
house,  in  the  South  as  in  the  North,  is  doing  its 
silent  and  unnoticed  work.  The  uplifting  of  the 
negro  is  not  the  work  of  yesterday  or  to-day  or  to 
morrow,  but  of  the  long  years  and  the  fruitful  cen 
turies  to  come. 

There  is  a  vein  of  tropical  imagination  in  the 
negro  which  has  never  yet  been  worked  to  its  legiti 
mate  limit.  He  responds  ultimately  to  patient  en 
deavour,  provided  one  can  arrest  his  enthusiasm  in 
the  right  way.  The  religion  of  the  black  man — in 
this  I  refer  to  the  ignorant  negro  of  the  fields  and 
not  the  cultivated  negro  of  the  schools — the  black 
man's  religion  is  exuberant  and  florid.  It  is  still 
tinged  with  the  most  curious  superstitions,  but  back 
of  all  this  is  a  sentimentality  which  might  readily 
make  a  devotee  under  proper  direction.  Grafted 
upon  the  sacred  truths  of  Christianity  are  quaint 
bits  of  voodooism,  and  the  Methodist  Protestant 
minister  still  runs  in  sharp  competition  to  the  snake 
doctor,  the  herb  woman,  and  the  moonlight  maker 
of  black  magic. 

I  know  of  one  case  wrhere  a  young  man  in  abject 
terror  complained  to  the  local  authorities  because 
his  uncle  had  gone  away  to  town  for  the  express 
purpose  of  buying  a  witch  candle,  which,  when 


30  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

lighted,  would  measure  the  span  of  life  of  the  trem 
bling  complainant.  He  fully  believed  that  unless  the 
white  man's  law  could  be  brought  to  bear,  his  breath 
would  be  cut  off  with  the  last  expiring  gasp  of  the 
witch  candle  his  uncle  would  bring  from  town. 

Such  superstitions,  and  much  more  curious  ones, 
are  openly  referred  to  in  many  a  plantation  pulpit, 
and  I  know  of  several  cases  where  the  shepherd  of 
a  flock  has  declared  that  acts  of  immorality  between 
members  of  the  same  church  are  entirely  without 
sin,  whereas,  if  committed  between  a  church  mem 
ber  and  an  outsider,  they  would  end  in  the  eternal 
damnation  of  both.  There  are  dusky  pastors  who 
run  riot  through  a  plantation  because  of  a  curious 
twisting  of  a  certain  biblical  text  concerning  their 
prerogatives  among  the  female  members  of  the 
flock.  Yet  all  these  appear  to  be  but  mere  barbaric 
gropings  after  a  still  better  and  more  emotional 
religion. 

Dr.  Booker  T.  Washington,  asked  for  his  per 
sonal  opinion  as  to  the  particular  tendency  or  ca 
pacity  of  the  negro,  as  a  guide  for  his  future  treat 
ment,  replied  without  hesitation,  in  words  which 
throw  an  interesting  sidelight  upon  this  question 
of  the  negro  temperament : 

'  The  negro's  most  prominent  trait  undoubtedly  is 
his  imagination.  This  might  cause  a  tendency  in  the 
race  later  on  toward  music,  poetry,  and  the  arts. 
Just  now,  however,  the  imaginative  faculty  seems 


The  Problem  of  Temperament        31 

to  lead  the  negro  chiefly  toward  oratory.  His  im 
agination  finds  its  readiest  outlet  in  fluency  of  talk 
and  this  probably  accounts  for  the  popularity  of 
politics  with  some  negroes,  while  in  others  this  racial 
trait  finds  expression  in  the  number  of  those  who 
take  up  preaching  as  a  congenial  profession,  in 
which  they  can  exercise  their  gift  of  oratory  and 
appeal  to  the  imagination  and  emotions  of  their 
audiences." 


Ill 

The  Mulatto 

ONE  question  of  interest  in  the  study  of  the 
possibilities  of  the  negro  is  that  of  the  rela 
tive  mental  and  physical  qualifications  of 
the   mulatto   as   compared   with   the   pure-blooded 
negro.    Professor  DuBois,  of  the  University  of  At 
lanta,  himself  one  of  the  mixed  race  and  one  of  the 
finest  specimens  of  a  cultivated  negro,  has  made  a 
thoughtful  analysis  of  the  situation. 

"  There  is  no  essential  mental  difference,"  he  says, 
"  between  the  mixed  breed  and  the  negro,  and  the 
two  different  charges  made  against  the  mulatto  are 
sufficient  evidence  of  this  fact.  In  the  first  place, 
the  Southern  white  people  constantly  assert  that  all 
that  has  been  accomplished  by  the  negro  has  been 
done  by  men  of  mixed  blood,  and  that  after  all  it  is 
only  the  white  strain  showing.  In  the  same  breath 
our  critics  assert  that  the  mulatto  is  responsible  for 
the  vices  of  the  negro,  and  that  he  is  a  mental  and 
moral  degenerate.  The  two  assertions  are  fre 
quently  heard  from  the  same  men  at  the  same  time, 
and  they  only  go  to  show  what  I  have  asserted,  that 
the  mulatto  is  no  better  and  no  worse  than  the  pure 

32 


The  Mulatto  33 

negro.  By  mulatto  I  mean,  of  course,  the  mixed 
breed,  because  the  variations  as  to  the  colour  strain 
on  the  one  side  or  the  other  are  becoming  too  com 
plicated  to  permit  us  to  follow  the  white  strain 
down  to  the  last  drop. 

"  The  mulattoes  or  mixed  race  have  had  an  ad 
vantage  of  the  black  negro  amounting  to  about  a 
generation,  merely  as  a  matter  of  environment.  The 
yellow  boys  and  girls  in  slavery  days  were  not  so 
regularly  put  to  work  in  the  fields,  but  were  gen 
erally  selected  for  house  servants,  and  were  fre 
quently  brought  to  the  cities  and  put  to  work  in 
house  service  and  in  hotels  as  messengers  and  in 
similar  employments.  It  thus  generally  happened 
that  the  mixed  race  was  thrown  more  in  contact 
with  the  educated  whites,  and  so  gradually  learned 
a  little  of  education,  a  little  imitation  refinement, 
and  some  beginnings  of  culture.  They  were  imi 
tative,  and  learned  a  good  deal  from  this  associa 
tion  with  white  people,  so  that,  taken  as  a  whole, 
the  mixed  race  found  itself  in  advance  of  the  pure 
negro. 

"  This  advantage  of  the  mulatto  was  a  matter  of 
association  merely.  In  men  as  in  animals  it  may 
be  presumed  that  breeding  will  tell,  and  to  a  slight 
extent  therefore  the  white  blood  tends  to  make  the 
mulatto  slightly  more  acute  than  his  negro  blood, 
but  in  point  of  fact  it  is  practically  difficult  to  trace 
the  difference." 


34  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

Professor  DuBois  went  on  to  show  the  photo 
graph  of  a  class  recently  graduated  from  Atlanta 
University,  quite  the  average  and  typical  of  the  usual 
class.  He  pointed  out  the  honour  students  among 
them.  "  Here,"  he  said,  "  is  a  girl  so  nearly  white 
you  could  scarcely  tell  the  difference ;  another  with 
white  features  and  a  dusky  skin.  Here  also  is  a 
pure  black,  thick-lipped  negro  boy,  and  another, 
black,  but  with  nearly  Caucasian  features.  This 
picture  shows  that  out  of  an  average  class  the 
students  who  are  distinguished  above  their  fellows 
represent  every  grade,  from  the  undeniable  negro 
type  to  the  girl  who  could  pass  muster  as  white  in 
almost  any  Northern  city. 

"  Mixture  of  the  races  is  not  to  be  feared  in 
itself,"  Professor  DuBois  continued.  "  What  is  to 
be  feared  is  the  mixture  of  the  bad  elements  in  both 
races.  If  you  take  a  vicious  white  man  and 
a  vicious  negro  and  mix  them  together,  the  offspring 
will  naturally  be  vicious,  not  because  he  is  a  mu 
latto,  but  because  his  parentage  is  bad.  The  safety 
of  the  whites,  as  far  as  the  process  of  amalgama 
tion  is  concerned,  lies  in  the  uplifting  of  the  negro 
race.  As  the  negroes  become  more  educated,  as 
they  acquire  a  pride  in  their  own  society,  illicit  as 
sociation  with  the  white  man  ceases  more  and  more, 
and  this  is  the  principal  reason  why  the  process  of 
amalgamation,  which  \vas  quite  rapid  a  generation 
ago,  has  now  become  considerably  reduced. 


The  Mulatto  35 

"  Many  of  the  shortcomings  charged  to  the  mu 
latto  might  easily  be  ascribed  to  the  notorious  de 
generacy  of  illegitimate  children.  As  the  tone  of 
the  coloured  race  is  raised,  the  connection  between 
white  and  black  will  necessarily  be  more  and  more 
among  the  most  vicious  of  the  coloured  people,  and 
hence  it  is  to  the  interest  of  everybody  to  upbuild 
the  coloured  race  as  rapidly  as  possible,  to  strengthen 
their  moral  tone,  and  thus  to  remove  them  from 
surroundings  where  they  become  victims  of  the 
vicious  elements  among  the  whites. 

"  Here  in  the  South  to-day  there  is  comparatively 
little  mixture  of  the  races  in  the  larger  cities,  but 
the  process  is  going  on  to  some  extent  in  the  smaller 
towns,  and  in  many  an  instance  a  prudent  negro 
mother  finds  it  wise  to  send  her  good-looking  yellow 
daughter  to  some  institution  to  save  her  from  the 
temptation  of  association  with  the  lowest  grade  of 
white  boys  in  the  neighbourhood." 

The  other  side  of  the  question,  that  of  attribut 
ing  all  the  achievements  of  the  negro  to  his  "  white 
strain,"  I  heard  discussed  by  Booker  Washington, 
himself  an  exponent  of  the  accepted  mulatto  type. 
He  never  knew  his  father  and  is  ignorant  of  his 
identity,  having  been  born  in  slavery;  but  he  is 
quite  light-coloured,  and  would  readily  pass  for  an 
educated  Cuban  or  South  American.  He  is  keenly 
alive  to  the  importance  of  the  question  as  frequently 
discussed  in  magazines  and  newspapers  regarding 


36  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

the  supposed  mental,  moral,  and  physical  degeneracy 
of  the  mixed  race. 

"  I  cannot  see,"  he  said,  "  that  there  is  any  great 
difference  between  the  mental  capacity  of  the  pure- 
blooded  negro  and  that  of  a  man  of  a  mixed 
race. 

"  Among  the  distinct  negro  types  that  are  black 
rather  than  of  mixed  blood,  who  have  done  most 
brilliant  work  in  real  life,  are  educators  like  William 
J.  Edwards,  principal  of  the  Normal  and  Industrial 
Institute  at  Snow  Hill,  Alabama;  Isaac  Fisher, 
principal  of  the  Branch  Normal  College  at  Pine 
Bluff,  Arkansas;  Lizzie  E.  Wright,  principal  of  the 
Voorhees  Normal  and  Industrial  Institute  at  Den 
mark,  South  Carolina;  C.  L.  Marshall,  principal 
of  the  Christiansburg  Normal  and  Industrial  Insti 
tute  at  Cambria,  Virginia;  and  William  H.  Holtz- 
claw,  principal  of  the  Utica  Normal  and  Industrial 
Institute  at  Utica,  Mississippi.  Right  here  in  Tuske- 
gee  we  have  another  evidence  in  the  person  of 
George  W.  Carver,  the  head  of  the  agricultural  de 
partment,  who  is  an  accurate  scientist,  trained  under 
the  personal  supervision  of  James  Wilson,  Secre 
tary  of  Agriculture,  who  was  formerly  at  the  head 
of  the  Iowa  State  Agricultural  College  at  Ames, 
Iowa. 

"  All  these  and  many  other  men  of  pure  negro 
blood  have  apparently  demonstrated  that  whatever 
achievements  are  made  by  the  negroes  are  not  to  be 


The  Mulatto  37 

credited  to  any  white  blood  they  have,  but  to  their 
perseverance  in  securing  a  good  education. 

"  As  to  the  physical  difference  between  the  mu 
latto  and  the  pure-bred  negro,  there  is  considerable 
diversity  of  opinion,  but  there  are  no  reliable  figures 
to  prove  that  a  man  of  mixed  blood  is  either  weaker 
or  stronger  than  his  black  brother." 

Some  years  ago  much  attention  was  attracted  by 
an  article,  which  attempted  to  show  that  the  mu- 
lattoes  were  chiefly  responsible  for  the  unrest  then 
existing  among  the  negroes.  The  author  was  Mr. 
Alfred  H.  Stone,  a  cotton  planter  of  Greenville, 
Mississippi,  a  Southerner  of  wide  personal  experi 
ence  among  the  negroes,  a  careful  student  of  the 
race  problem,  and  singularly  free  from  prejudice. 
He  told  me  that  he  was  becoming  more  and  more 
convinced  that  it  is  the  mulatto  who  must  be  dealt 
with  by  the  white  man  rather  than  the  pure  negro, 
who  is,  he  asserts,  blindly  following  the  lead  of  his 
hybrid  brother. 

"  The  mulatto  is  not  a  degenerate,"  he  said ;  "  on 
the  contrary,  the  mixed  blood  is  far  superior  to  the 
negro.  The  mulatto  may  solve  the  race  question 
for  us  some  day.  The  time  is  coming,  and  it  is  not 
so  far  off,  when  there  will  be  a  breaking  up  of  old 
associations  and  the  mulatto  and  the  negro  will  for 
ever  separate.  This  is  the  condition  now  in  many 
of  the  West  India  Islands,  and  my  observation  is 
that  we  are  drifting  into  the  same  condition  of 


38  The  Negro  an-d  His  Needs 

affairs.  The  mulatto  is  all  powerful  in  the  negro 
community  to-day.  His  influence  is  dominant  either 
for  good  or  for  evil. 

"  I  am  quite  aware  of  the  fact  that  well-known 
mulatto  leaders  like  Booker  T.  Washington  and 
Professor  DuBois  constantly  declare  in  public  that 
there  is  no  difference  between  the  pure  negro  and  the 
man  of  mixed  blood.  I  believe,  however,  that  they 
make  these  statements  more  as  a  matter  of  policy 
and  to  unite  the  race,  although  in  their  heart  of 
hearts  they  know  and  believe  that  the  white  strain 
does  tell  and  that  practically  all  the  men  of  so-called 
negro  blood  who  have  done  anything  in  the  world 
are  of  the  mulatto  type. 

"  From  my  personal  talk  with  the  men  of  the 
mixed  blood,  I  am  convinced  that  they  all  feel  the 
degradation  involved  in  being  put  into  the  same 
class  with  the  black  field  hand.  I  know  that  many 
mulattoes  feel  sore  about  this,  and  while  they  con 
tinue  to  assert  the  oneness  of  the  negro  race,  for 
obvious  reasons  of  policy,  in  private  conversation 
they  inevitably  lay  stress  upon  their  blood  relation 
to  the  white  man,  and  constantly  call  attention  to 
their  white  ancestry. 

"  So  far  as  concerns  the  truth  of  my  contention 
that  it  is  the  mulatto  who  is  the  cause  of  dissension 
and  unrest  among  the  negroes,  I  am  willing  to 
leave  that  to  the  judgment  of  any  fair  man  who  will 
take  the  trouble  to  go  over  the  files  of  representative 


The  Mulatto  39 

negro  journals  and  magazines.  He  will  find  that 
these  papers  are  published  by  mulattoes,  and  are  a 
source  of  great  danger  and  positive  menace  to  any 
thing  like  permanent  good  relations  between  the 
races,  making  as  they  do  constant  appeals  to  pas 
sion  and  hate,  and  parading  and  exaggerating  griev 
ances  and  wrongs.  The  editor  of  one  paper,  proba 
bly  the  worst,  is  called  a  negro,  but  is  really  a  com 
bination  of  Indian,  negro,  and  white  man.  As  a 
factor  for  creating  strife  and  ill-feeling,  I  will 
match  him  as  a  mulatto  against  any  two  dozen  pure 
negroes  Mr.  Washington  can  produce  in  America." 

Mr.  Stone  corroborated  what  I  was  told  all  over 
the  South,  that  the  amalgamation  of  the  black  and 
the  white  races  is  rapidly  disappearing. 

'  There  was  a  vast  amount  of  this  amalgamation," 
he  said,  "  up  to  perhaps  twenty  years  ago.  Since 
then  there  has  been  a  decided  change  of  sentiment 
on  the  part  of  Southern  white  men.  I  know  that 
not  so  long  ago  it  was  not  an  uncommon  thing  to 
find  an  overseer  or  superintendent  on  a  plantation 
who  would  have  from  one  to  half  a  dozen  con 
cubines.  This  practice  has  practically  been  done 
away  with.  The  planters  will  not  permit  their  over 
seers  to  do  such  things,  and  the  overseers  them 
selves  seldom  offend  in  this  regard,  although  they 
are  placed  in  an  extraordinary  position,  frequently 
being  the  only  white  persons  in  a  great  multitude 
of  coloured  people.  The  mixture  of  the  races  is 


4O  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

quite  evidently  dying  out,  at  least  for  the  present, 
and  this  increases  the  importance  of  the  mulatto,  and 
renders  it  easier  for  him  to  assume  actual  leader 
ship." 

Whether  the  mulatto's  ability  is  vastly  superior 
to  that  of  the  black  negro,  will  be  an  open  question 
for  many  years  to  come.  But  there  is  a  curious  vein 
of  vanity  that  enters  into  his  influence  in  the  negro 
community,  which  is  unquestioned,  and  which  is, 
after  all,  universally  human.  I  refer  to  his  acknowl 
edged  good  looks,  which  invariably  command  the 
childish  and  boastful  admiration  of  the  blacks,  and 
which  make  for  popularity,  and,  naturally,  add  to 
his  influence. 

The  coloured  woman,  who  by  various  and  mys 
terious  methods,  straightens  the  kinks  out  of  her 
wool  for  the  time  being,  may  be  loudly  denounced 
by  her  less  successful  sisters,  but  they  invariably  be 
lieve  her  achievement  to  be  one  more  step  toward 
the  beauty  of  the  whites ! 

The  traditional  "  ole  time  darkey,"  whose  passing 
the  Southerner  constantly  mourns,  is  the  black  man 
or  woman,  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  rather  than  the 
light-coloured  or  "  brown-skinned  "  servant.  The 
mulatto  may  have  the  ambition,  with  its  common 
discontent  and  restlessness,  due  to  his  white  strain, 
but  he  has  no  more  energy,  if  as  much,  and,  gen 
erally  speaking,  far  less  conscientious  thoroughness, 
than  his  pure  black  brother. 


IV 

The  Problem  of  Immorality 

ONE  of  the  things  which  would  strike  the  most 
casual  observer  is  the  persistence  with 
which  the  white  men  who  are  undeniably 
good  friends  of  the  negroes  represent  the  entire 
black  race  as  being  grossly  immoral  and  difficult  to 
deal  with.  At  all  times  and  in  all  places,  from  the 
most  intelligent,  the  most  impartial,  and  the  most 
shrewd  white  observers  in  the  South,  one  hears 
that  a  negro  man,  as  well  as  a  negro  woman,  is 
absolutely  devoid  of  the  slightest  idea  of  morality, 
that  he  is  constantly  degenerating,  and  that  he  is 
becoming  more  and  more  a  brute  every  day. 

There  must  be  something  in  these  statements,  be 
cause,  otherwise,  they  would  not  be  repeated  so  per 
sistently,  and  by  men  whose  opinion  is  entitled  to 
all  respect.  Nevertheless,  a  casual  and  possibly  su 
perficial  examination  of  the  life  and  condition  of 
the  negroes  in  the  cities  does  not  seem  to  bear  out 
the  statements  at  all.  I  have  been  into  negro  slums 
in  most  of  the  large  cities  of  the  South,  and  I  have 
arrived  at  the  conclusion,  based  on  what  I  have  seen, 
that  the  so-called  criminal  classes  among  the  negroes 

41 


42  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

are  as  an  average  far  more  law-abiding,  far  less 
noisy,  far  more  apt  to  have  their  fun  by  themselves 
than  the  similar  class  in  white  slums  in  Northern 
cities.  This  observation  will  probably  be  resented 
by  Southern  men,  but  it  is  honestly  made,  after 
studying  the  most  debased  class  of  negroes,  who 
are  admittedly  in  the  cities.  However  debased  they 
may  be  in  their  private  life,  the  side  they  show  to 
the  casual  observer  leads  me  to  believe  that  they 
are  not  nearly  so  black  as  they  are  painted. 

In  New  Orleans,  for  example,  beside  studying 
the  roustabout  negro  on  the  great  levee  which  was 
once  the  glory  of  the  Crescent  City,  I  spent  an  even 
ing  investigating  some  of  the  worst  of  the  negro 
sections.  I  came  out  of  the  little  expedition  greatly 
surprised  at  the  comparative  decency  and  good  or 
der  of  the  alleged  debased  negroes.  There  was  once 
an  alderman  in  New  Orleans  by  the  name  of  Story, 
who  conceived  the  idea  of  confining  the  disreputable 
class,  both  white  and  coloured,  to  a  certain  section 
of  the  city.  His  idea  was  successfully  carried  out ; 
but  unfortunately  for  him,  the  people  persisted  in 
calling  that  section  of  New  Orleans  "  Storyville," 
and  so  it  is  known  to  this  day.  On  my  way  to  the 
distinctly  negro  section  I  was  brought  face  to  face 
with  the  most  flagrant  exhibition  of  the  social  evil 
among  the  whites  I  have  ever  seen  in  any  city  of 
the  United  States. 

For  several  city  blocks  there  is  a  continuous  line 


The  Problem  of  Immorality          43 

of  little  houses,  each  of  which  is  occupied  by  a 
white  woman,  who  stands  at  the  door  all  the  evening 
long  in  short  skirts,  with  bare  arms  and  extrava 
gantly  decollete  dresses,  if  such  one  can  call 
the  garments  these  women  affect.  Such  a  startling 
exhibition  of  vice  and  debauchery  as  this,  such  open 
solicitation  from  the  doorsteps,  such  an  outrageous 
exhibition  in  public  by  gaslight  of  unadorned  fe 
male  charms,  would  not  be  permitted  in  New  York 
or  Chicago  for  fifteen  minutes.  The  worst  episodes 
in  the  Tenderloin  are  a  Sunday-school  compared  to 
a  five-minute  walk  through  the  most  populous  sec 
tion  of  Storyville  in  New  Orleans. 

Having  passed  through  this  experience,  I  was 
most  agreeably  surprised  to  find  that  my  destination, 
a  negro  gambling  house,  dance  hall,  saloon,  and 
crap-shooting  parlour,  all  under  one  roof,  was  an 
exceedingly  tame  affair.  In  that  joint,  among  the 
most  debased  class  of  negroes  in  the  city,  I  spent 
a  considerable  time,  and  there  was  not  a  suspicion 
of  a  fight,  nor  anything  which  even  approached  the 
extravagant  white  debauchery  a  block  further  up 
the  street.  Men  and  women  came  in  and  out,  a 
little  gambling  was  going  on  in  an  interior  room, 
there  was  some  drinking  at  the  bar,  a  good  deal  of 
familiarity  between  the  two  sexes,  and  an  occasional 
expose  of  gaudy  hosiery  with  malice  intent  e,  but  for 
the  most  part,  the  exhibition  was  simply  downright 
stupid  vulgarity.  I  do  not  doubt  that  this  negro 


44  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

establishment  could  be  excelled  for  indecency  by 
any  similar  establishment  among  the  whites  in  al 
most  any  city  of  fifty  thousand  or  more  inhab 
itants. 

It  was  here  that  I  met  Felix.  That  was  the  only 
name  he  responded  to.  He  was  one  of  the  managers 
of  the  place,  a  shrewd,  intelligent  negro,  who  talked 
a  curious  patois,  derived  in  equal  quantities  from 
his  French  father  and  his  negro  mother.  Leaning 
up  against  the  penny-in-the-slot  gambling  machine, 
he  gave  me  the  only  practical  suggestion  I  have  yet 
heard  regarding  the  question  of  lynching  for  crim 
inal  assault.  Without  the  idioms  of  the  dialect, 
what  he  said  was  somewhat  as  follows : 

"  I  have  not  always  been  able  to  understand  this 
assault  business,  and  I  do  not  quite  understand  it  yet. 
I  think  every  man  who  assaults  a  woman  ought  to 
have  his  life  taken  away  from  him,  and  the  sooner 
the  better.  Just  what  makes  our  people  make  as 
saults  I  cannot  tell  you.  As  to  that,  it  seems  to  be 
in  the  blood  of  some  black  people.  I  think  you  will 
find  that  the  men  who  commit  this  terrible  act  are 
almost  always  very  black  men,  very  big  men,  and 
very  ignorant  men;  in  almost  every  case  they  are 
negroes  brought  up  in  the  fields  and  who  know  but 
little  about  civilized  life.  You  will  seldom  hear  of 
a  mulatto  assaulting  either  a  white  woman  or  a 
black  woman.  I  believe  the  men  who  commit  this 
crime  ought  to  be  hanged  right  away,  but  they  ought 


The  Problem  of  Immorality          45 

not  to  be  lynched.  The  only  excuse  for  lynching  I 
have  ever  heard  is  that  the  law  is  so  slow  in  its 
operation.  That  is  true,  but  it  could  easily  be  fixed. 
It  would  be  a  simple  matter  to  pass  a  law  giving 
the  coroner's  jury  authority,  in  cases  of  assault,  to 
determine  the  guilt  of  the  person,  and  if  he  were 
found  guilty,  to  execute  him  within  twenty-four 
hours.  That  would  have  a  much  better  effect  upon 
the  black  people  who  are  addicted  to  those  crimes 
than  lynching  ever  could  have.  Many  black  people 
are  so  stirred  up  at  the  injustice  of  a  lynching  party 
that  they  forget  the  fact  that  the  man  deserves  to 
die  for  the  beastly  crime  he  committed.  If  some 
quick  action  according  to  law,  like  the  one  I  have 
suggested,  could  be  adopted,  the  terror  to  the  negro 
would  be  just  the  same,  and  the  white  men  would 
not  have  constantly  to  defend  themselves  for  defy 
ing  the  law  which  they  themselves  make,  and  which 
they  will  not  permit  us  either  to  make  or  to  change." 

There  seems  a  great  deal  of  reason  in  these  sug 
gestions,  especially  as  they  came  from  a  man  who 
was  at  that  minute  overlooking  a  crowd  of  debased 
negro  hoodlums  of  the  class  which  might  commit 
such  crimes.  I  encouraged  him  to  give  me  some 
more  of  his  short-range  criminal  experience,  and 
in  reply  he  said  what  every  person  in  the  South 
knows  to  be  true: 

"  In  most  cases  the  right  man  is  lynched,  I  guess, 
but  we  coloured  people  know  that  in  many  other 


46  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

cases  they  get  the  wrong  man  and  he  is  hanged  just 
the  same,  or  burned  just  the  same,  or  shot  just  the 
same  as  if  he  had  done  something.  That  is  what 
makes  the  coloured  people  so  resentful,  even  in  case 
of  the  lynching  of  one  of  their  number  who  has 
really  committed  an  assault.  I  know  of  a  case  my 
self  out  in  the  country  here,  where  there  was  a  poor 
black  man  in  the  cornfield  at  work.  He  did  not 
know  there  was  anybody  near  him,  but  in  working 
through  the  corn  he  made  more  or  less  noise,  as  a 
matter  of  course.  A  young  white  girl  who  was  pass 
ing  by  took  fright,  and  running  to  the  nearest  house 
reported  that  a  negro  had  jumped  at  her.  A  crowd 
was  gathered  together;  they  had  their  guns,  and  the 
first  thing  that  poor  negro  knew  he  was  captured. 
He  had  not  even  seen  the  girl,  and  did  not  under 
stand  why  he  had  been  pursued.  Nevertheless,  he 
was  hanged  just  the  same.  That  was  a  mistake  on 
the  part  of  a  mob,  to  be  sure,  but  it  was  a  mistake 
that  happens  too  often,  and  every  such  mistake 
makes  the  coloured  people  who  know  of  it  more 
angry,  more  resentful,  more  disposed  to  commit 
such  crimes  than  they  were  before." 

Felix  had  a  theory  all  his  own  that  the  black 
negro  is  inferior  to  the  mulatto  in  intelligence,  in 
capacity  for  education,  and  in  morals.  He  believed 
that  the  black  people  know  this,  and  seek  the  society 
of  the  mulatto  as  the  next  thing  to  that  of  the 
white  man.  "  The  white  strain  tells  every  time," 


The  Problem  of  Immorality          47 

he  insisted.  But  then,  Felix  was  half  French,  and 
probably  prejudiced. 

It  was  from  this  same  Felix  that  I  learned  also 
of  the  widespread  and  constantly  increasing  use  of 
cocaine  in  various  forms  among  the  more  debased 
negroes,  and  of  the  growing  indulgence  in  all  kinds 
of  alcoholic  stimulants  among  negro  women.  It  is 
interesting,  too,  to  know  that  the  negro  in  the  South 
has  long  since  stopped  carrying  a  razor,  and  now 
carries  a  pistol.  My  friend  pointed  out  a  half-dozen 
roughly  clad,  big,  burly  negro  roustabouts,  every 
one  of  whom,  he  declared,  had  a  pistol  inside  his 
shirt,  some  of  them  two.  This,  like  some  other  bad 
characteristics  of  the  negro,  may  be  traced  to  the 
deficient  civilization  of  the  South  itself.  That  is, 
the  pistol-carrying  custom  is  a  direct  imitation  of 
the  white  man's  habit,  and  is  in  itself  responsible 
for  many  brutal  killings. 

It  is  in  this  same  spirit  of  imitation  that  the  negro 
so  frequently  assumes  an  offensive  strut  or  swagger, 
intended  really  to  be  a  copy  of  the  independent  walk 
of  the  white  man  whom  he  acknowledges  to  be  so 
vastly  his  superior  as  to  stir  him  to  emulation.  That 
white  man  has  not  taught  him  morality,  either;  if 
he  has,  how  can  one  account  for  the  numberless 
thousands  of  men  and  women  of  mixed  race,  some 
old  enough  to  date  back  to  the  "  good  old  slavery 
days  "  and  others  the  manifest  product  of  a  deficient 
moral  sentiment  on  the  part  of  the  white  man  to- 


48  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

day?  Few  mulattoes  walk  the  earth  whose  strain 
ol  white  blood  was  introduced  into  their  veins 
through  the  medium  of  lawful  wedlock,  and  if  the 
negro  of  the  fields  is  immoral  to  an  atrocious  de 
gree,  and  I  am  not  disposed  to  deny  it,  every  mu 
latto  he  meets  is  a  reminder  to  him  of  the  fact 
that  certain  white  men,  in  spite  of  their  boasted 
civilization,  have  no  higher  standard  of  morality 
than  this  ignorant  black  savage  who  hoes  the  cotton 
and  the  corn  all  day  long,  who  laughs  half  the 
night  through,  and  who  knows  little  of  care  and 
less  of  morality. 

What  may  be  made  even  of  the  debased  class  of 
negroes,  under  proper  enforcement  of  law,  is  evi 
denced  in  the  curious  old  city  of  Charleston,  the 
"  cradle  of  the  Confederacy,"  with  its  gentle  flavour 
of  mild  decay.  It  is  not  a  lively  place  in  summer, 
but  it  is  at  that  season  that  the  coloured  people 
flock  into  the  town.  I  was  sitting  one  hot  day  in 
the  mayor's  office  when  the  chief  of  police  came  in 
with  a  report  that  there  were  in  his  opinion  2,500 
more  idle  negroes  in  the  city  than  there  were  a  year 
before,  thus  calling  for  unusual  police  vigilance.  In 
number  the  negroes  of  Charleston  far  exceed  the 
whites,  and  they  are  notably  quiet.  Walking  late 
at  night  through  the  negro  quarter,  I  found  far  less 
disturbance  than  one  would  find  in  a  corresponding 
quarter  among  the  bitterly  poor  in  New  York  or 
Chicago. 


The  Problem  of  Immorality          49 

Within  sight  of  Fort  Sumter  negro  policemen 
patrol  their  beats  and  perform  their  duties  to  the 
entire  satisfaction  of  the  authorities.  One  even 
rose  to  the  distinction  of  becoming  a  lieutenant,  in 
command  of  white  men  yet  without  ill  feeling.  On 
the  whole,  whatever  may  be  thought  or  said  as  to 
the  morality  or  immorality  of  the  negroes,  it  cannot 
be  asserted  that  they  are  distinctly  vicious  or  dan 
gerous  to  the  public  peace  as  a  whole.  On  the  con 
trary,  they  are  naturally  docile  and  peaceable.  This 
may  or  may  not  be  due  to  the  fact  that  they  know 
that  punishment,  swift  and  sure,  will  follow  any 
serious  offence,  without  much  regard  to  the  law's 
delays,  and  indeed  without  much  regard  to  the  law 
itself. 

As  to  the  general  moral  condition  of  the  negro 
race  in  the  South,  I  was  one  day  fortunate  enough 
to  hear  a  discussion  by  Governor  Sanders  of  Louis 
iana,  originator  of  the  "  grandfather  clause  "  and 
a  native  of  the  Bayou  State.  The  state  of  things  as 
he  saw  it  was  deplorable.  "  Nothing  has  ever  been 
known,"  he  said,  "  like  the  rapid  degeneracy  of  the 
negro  in  the  last  twenty  or  thirty  years.  It  is  al 
most  unbelievable,  and  cannot  yet  be  comprehended 
by  any  one  who  has  not  watched  it  day  by  day.  The 
negroes  are  rapidly  drifting  toward  the  cities,  leav 
ing  the  country  never  to  return.  The  degenerate 
class  of  negroes  is  becoming  addicted  to  all  possible 
vices  and  drug  habits,  using  whiskey,  cocaine,  mor- 


50  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

phine,  and  similar  things.  Out  of  a  thousand  ne 
groes  you  would  find  at  least  seven  hundred  afflicted 
with  the  vilest  contagious  diseases,  which  are  being 
transmitted  to  countless  children. 

'  These  negroes  are  infinitely  worse  than  the 
worst  of  their  race  twenty  years  ago.  During  the 
war-times  the  white  people  left  their  mothers,  their 
wives,  their  sweethearts,  their  children  to  the  care 
of  the  old-time  negroes.  They  never  betrayed  their 
trust,  and  there  was  never  a  case  of  violence  to 
women  or  actual  loss  to  property,  although  every 
able-bodied  white  man  was  away  in  the  army." 

Following  up  this  thought,  Mr.  Sanders  with  con 
siderable  impressiveness  voiced  the  common  fear 
one  hears  about  the  South,  which  is  always  ex 
pressed  as  a  justification  for  stern  measures. 

"  What  we  are  going  to  do  when  the  last  safe 
guard  of  these  old-time  negro  people  is  gone  I  don't 
know.  Their  loyalty  is  beyond  question,  and  with 
that  class  of  negro  there  is  no  trouble.  Why,  some 
of  the  old  negroes  still  travel  fifty  miles  to  see  my 
old  father,  and  he  has  them  up  on  the  gallery  of  the 
house,  where  they  talk  for  hours  of  the  old  days  in 
the  parish,  recalling  incidents  of  forty,  fifty,  and 
even  sixty  years  ago.  But  the  white  man  in  the 
South  to-day  is  constantly  pursued  by  the  awful 
nightmare  of  the  danger  to  women  and  children  in 
those  sections  where  fiendish  crimes  are  reported, 
and  no  one  knows  just  how  fast  or  how  far  this 


The  Problem  of  Immorality          51 

mania  among  the  black  people  for  assaults  upon  the 
life  and  honour  of  white  women  will  go.  Lynching 
does  not  seem  to  frighten  these  brutes,  and  the  out 
look  for  the  future  appears  to  have  nothing  in  it 
except  through  the  extermination  or  the  deportation 
of  the  negro." 

I  suggested  that  if  the  negroes  were  diffused 
throughout  the  country  so  that  they  would  form 
only  a  small  percentage  of  the  population  in  any 
one  place,  thus  breaking  down  the  dangerous  con 
gestion  of  the  blacks  in  the  South,  it  would  possibly 
solve  the  problem.  I  was  surprised,  however,  when 
the  clear-headed  sugar  planter,  lawyer,  and  legis 
lator  advanced  an  entirely  new  idea  in  this  direc 
tion,  which  may  or  may  not  be  sound  in  principle, 
but  which  is  none  the  less  the  point  of  view  of  an 
acute,  even  if  he  may  be  a  prejudiced,  observer. 

"  Diffusion  of  the  negro  will  never  help  matters, 
and  I  will  tell  you  why.  You  will  find  that  conditions 
in  the  hill  country  of  Louisiana,  Alabama,  Georgia, 
and  the  Carolinas  are  practically  the  same.  In  none 
of  these  sections  does  the  negro  dominate  in  point 
of  numbers.  The  black  man  is  concentrated  along 
the  alluvial  bottomlands,  and  in  those  sections  he 
largely  outnumbers  the  whites.  In  the  hill  country, 
where  the  whites  outnumber  the  blacks,  far  different 
conditions  prevail  from  those  prevalent  in  the  bot 
tomlands. 

"  In   the   cotton   country   upon   the   hills,   Tom 


52  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

Brown,  the  white  man,  and  Tom  Jones,  the  black 
man,  have  farms  side  by  side.  They  do  the  same 
work  in  the  field,  borrow  and  lend  ploughs  and  other 
implements,  and  their  women  swap  corn  meal  over 
the  fence.  Theoretically,  there  is  neither  social  nor 
political  equality,  but  the  white  and  the  black  are 
thrown  together  in  a  way  which  has  a  disastrous 
effect  upon  the  young  buck  negro  whose  father  is 
perhaps  one  of  the  better  class.  The  young  black 
man  Jones  sees  the  white  Miss  Brown  doing  about 
the  same  work  as  his  sister,  and  living  on  terms  of 
actual  industrial  equality.  He  makes  advances 
much  as  a  white  boy  might,  and  is  repulsed  in  dis 
gust  and  reminded  of  the  social  differences  he  has 
forgotten.  Then  his  savage  blood  flames  up,  and 
he  takes  by  force  what  he  can't  have  by  consent  and 
gratifies  his  lust  at  the  expense  of  the  poor,  honest, 
virtuous  white  girl.  Then  the  white  men  gather 
quickly,  and  hang  the  negro  or  perhaps  burn  him, 
as  they  have  done  in  Delaware  and  in  Illinois.  That 
is  what  association  on  terms  of  apparent  equally 
invariably  does  for  the  negro. 

"  In  my  home  at  St.  Mary's  Parish,  and  in  all 
other  sections  where  the  black  man  largely  outnum 
bers  the  white,  the  conditions  are  almost  exactly 
the  reverse.  In  the  real  black  belt  you  seldom  hear 
of  these  horrible  cases  which  in  other  sections  seem 
to  be  on  the  increase.  With  us  the  negroes  never 
see  the  white  people  on  anything  like  terms  of 


The  Problem  of  Immorality          53 

equality.  The  planter,  the  overseer,  and  all  the 
white  people  about  the  place  ride  on  horses,  while 
the  negro  walks.  The  black  man  seldom  sees  the 
women  of  the  plantations,  except  in  their  carriages. 
The  effect  of  all  this  is  that  the  negro  recognizes 
the  white  man  as  a  superior  being,  and  it  never 
occurs  to  him  to  offer  any  indignity,  much  less  to 
attempt  violence  against  the  superior  race. 

"  Is  it  any  wonder  that  the  old-time  lust  of  blood 
sometimes  strikes  in  on  the  white  people,  as  they 
see  the  old-fashioned  negro  disappearing,  and 
crimes  of  inconceivable  brutality  increasing,  while 
the  negro  is  degenerating  into  a  debased  animal  ?  " 


The  Problem  of  Environment 

L£T  any  Northern  man  stand  on  the  levee  of 
the    little    plantation    town    of    St.  Joseph, 
Louisiana,  and  watch  the  antics  of  two  or 
three  thousand  negroes,  more  or  less  inebriated,  and 
he  will  be  likely  to  change  his  mind  as  to  the  sim 
plicity  of  the  negro  question  in  the  South.     And  if 
he  will  linger  there  till  after  nightfall,  he  will  begin 
to  understand  the  serious  social  equation  the  South 
ern  people  have  been  called  to  solve,  and  the  dif 
ficulty  of  applying  ordinary  mathematics  to  it. 

This  picturesque  little  town  of  St.  Joseph  is  an 
aggregation  of  the  houses  of  more  or  less  wealthy 
planters,  with  a  vast  population  around  them  of 
black  labourers,  all  engaged  in  cultivating  the  great 
staple,  cotton,  with  a  few  patches  here  and  there  of 
such  corn  as  may  be  necessary  to  supply  meal.  To 
reach  the  place  one  must  go  either  to  Vicksburg  or 
Natchez  by  rail,  and  from  there  journey  on  a  Mis 
sissippi  packet  which  lands  one  on  the  banks  of  the 
great  river  after  dark.  It  is  so  hard  to  get  from 
St.  Joseph  to  any  other  place  that  the  negroes  here 
have  been  left  nearly  as  they  were  fifty  years  ago. 

54 


The  Problem  of  Environment         55 

They  are  perfectly  free ;  they  can  pick  up  and  leave 
the  town  whenever  they  see  fit,  since  there  are  no 
contracts,  no  laws,  no  public  sentiment  to  hold  them 
in  the  vicinity.  But  they  are  merely  so  far  away 
from  the  railroad  that  they  have  remained  here, 
and  are  an  interesting  social  study,  because  typical 
of  the  original,  unadulterated  negro  of  slavery 
times,  untouched  by  close  association  with  white 
people. 

I  was  fortunate  enough  to  happen  into  the  town 
on  the  Fourth  of  July,  and  to  see  a  spontaneous  but 
perfectly  peaceable  negro  celebration.  There  were 
no  firecrackers,  there  was  no  noise,  except  the  loud 
laughter  of  the  happiest,  most  light-hearted  race  the 
sun  shines  on.  In  the  sunny  South  fireworks  are 
reserved  for  Christmas  time,  when  the  negro  is  paid 
off.  The  Fourth  of  July  is  not  wadely  celebrated  by 
the  whites,  but  the  negroes  claim  it  as  a  holiday. 
The  ordinary  custom  gives  a  half  holiday  on  every 
Saturday  and  a  whole  holiday  on  Sunday,  so  that 
it  is  a  happy  year  for  the  planters  when  the  Fourth 
comes  on  a  Saturday,  thus  allowing  the  whole  of 
Sunday  for  the  sobering-up  process. 

The  principal  attraction  of  the  negro  Fourth  of 
July  was  the  ball  game  in  the  afternoon  between 
two  rival  nines,  which  played  on  a  white  man's  field 
just  at  the  edge  of  town,  and  the  spectators  of  which 
filled  the  white  man's  grandstand.  It  is  the  custom 
also  to  have  a  white  man  for  umpire  on  these  occa- 


56  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

sions,  because  otherwise  that  official  is  in  danger  of 
losing  his  life  before  the  end  of  the  game. 

Both  nines  appeared  on  the  field  in  their  stocking 
feet,  with  the  exception  of  one  or  two  star  players 
on  each  side,  who  preferred  the  bare  skin  under 
neath.  The  stockings  were  utilized  as  a  kind  of 
uniform,  and  the  darkey  who  could  produce  the 
loudest  and  most  violently  striped  hose  was  the  par 
ticular  pet  of  the  grandstand.  A  few  had  on 
knickerbockers,  but  most  of  them  rolled  their  ordi 
nary  trousers  to  the  knees  and  then  tucked  them 
into  their  gaudy  stockings.  The  effect  of  this  was 
frequently  ludicrous,  because  the  negroes  in  this 
section  of  Louisiana  are  addicted  to  an  article  of 
clothing  known  as  the  "  Wagner  Pants."  These 
are  a  species  of  trousers  which  are  extremely  wide 
over  the  foot,  after  the  style  affected  by  sailors. 
When  the  lower  extremities  of  a  pair  of  these 
"  Wagner  Pants "  ( for  which,  by  the  way,  the 
darkies  will  pay  more  than  for  any  other  variety) 
are  stuffed  into  a  pair  of  red,  yellow,  and  green 
socks,  the  effect  is  startling. 

The  baseball  of  the  plantation  negro  is  not  half 
so  bad  as  one  might  expect,  and,  except  for  the 
grotesque  shouting  of  the  participants,  varied  with 
lively  dialogues  between  the  first  baseman  and  the 
spectators,  it  might  easily  have  been  an  afternoon 
game  between  country  teams  in  the  North. 

It  was  merely  the  prelude,  however,  of  the  real 


The  Problem  of  Environment         57 

business  of  the  day,  and  simply  served  to  sharpen 
the  appetite  for  the  determined  attack  made  upon 
the  whiskey  barrels  in  the  village  stores.  It  is  the 
habit  of  the  darkies  every  Saturday  to  come  into 
town  in  the  afternoon  and  spend  all  the  money  they 
can  beg,  borrow,  or  steal  for  whiskey,  and  in  this 
respect  the  negro  women  have  become  the  greatest 
offenders. 

All  the  afternoon  a  perfect  stream  of  Afro-Amer 
ican  women  flowed  into  the  town,  and  it  was  sur 
prising  to  note  how  well  dressed  they  were.  The 
colours  were  of  the  most  extraordinary  combina 
tions,  the  millinery  could  only  have  been  concocted 
in  a  dream,  but  the  general  effect  was  remarkably 
good.  On  the  whole,  the  plantation  darkies  when 
they  first  arrive  in  town  will  impress  one  more  fa 
vourably  than  the  same  number  of  foreigners  from 
the  'way-back  agricultural  counties  upon  a  similar 
holiday.  The  negro  women  made  a  brave  showing 
in  the  grandstand  at  the  ball  game,  for  a  few 
innings,  but  they  rapidly  drifted  down  town,  and 
before  the  afternoon  was  well  spent  the  better  part 
of  them  was  far  on  the  way  toward  a  condition  of 
gross  intoxication. 

The  scenes  in  the  little  town  after  dark  were 
not  at  all  pleasant.  As  I  stood  on  the  "  gallery  " 
of  Moore's  big  supply  store  I  saw  full  fifty  young 
women  in  a  state  of  beastly  intoxication,  smoking 
pipes,  cigars,  and  cigarettes,  or  chewing  plug  to- 


58  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

bacco,  staggering  about  the  streets,  being  helped 
into  the  buggies  in  which  they  came,  or  openly 
making  love  in  the  most  disgusting  manner  to  their 
black-skinned  sweethearts.  Some  of  them,  both 
men  and  women,  were  completely  overcome,  and 
had  been  rolled  into  corners  to  sleep  it  off,  while 
one  black  man,  quite  gorgeously  arrayed,  was  sleep 
ing  the  sleep  of  the  just,  rolled  across  a  barrel,  his 
head  and  feet  both  on  the  floor. 

The  remarkable  thing  about  this  wholesale  de 
bauch  was  the  fact  that  there  were  no  serious  fights. 
There  were  only  a  few  white  people  in  the  town, 
but  no  negro  offered  the  slightest  indignity  to  any 
white  man.  They  quarrelled  among  themselves  con 
stantly,  to  be  sure,  but  these  were  only  ordinary 
drunken  wrangles,  almost  invariably  between  a  man 
and  the  woman  whom  for  the  time  being  he  called 
his  wife.  She  never,  it  seemed,  wanted  to  go  home 
when  he  did,  and  if  they  came  in  a  buggy,  as  many 
did,  the  pair  were  obliged  to  submit  to  arbitration 
before  they  could  decide  when  to  unhitch  the  mule 
and  start  homeward.  The  general  peaceableness 
of  the  day  was  all  the  more  surprising  in  view  of 
the  fact  that  a  large  proportion  of  these  negroes 
carried  pistols.  Among  white  men  of  the  same  de 
based  class,  the  combination  of  whiskey  and  pistols 
would  have  been  sure  to  result  disastrously. 

After  they  left  the  town,  a  large  percentage  of 
the  celebrants  went  on  to  a  nearby  cross-road  where 


The  Problem  of  Environment         59 

there  was  a  big  dance  and  other  festivities.  At 
this  last  place  the  crowd  used  up  all  the  whiskey, 
and  then  proceeded  to  purchase  at  famine  prices  the 
entire  stock  of  brandied  cherries  the  store  could  pro 
duce.  The  whole  debauch  was  shocking,  and  I  have 
detailed  it  merely  to  show  the  kind  of  negro  with 
whom  the  Southern  planter  has  to  deal.  For  this 
Fourth  of  July  episode  is  by  no  means  extraordi 
nary.  It  is  repeated  every  Saturday  night  in  a 
minor  degree,  and  on  some  special  occasions  be 
comes  much  more  serious. 

The  plantation  negro  will  go  a  long  way  for  a 
bottle  of  whiskey.  Especially  among  the  women 
the  drink  craze  has  taken  such  possession  that  they 
seem  to  have  but  two  ambitions  in  life,  to  adorn 
themselves  in  bright-coloured  calico,  and  to  drink 
themselves  into  quarrelsome  inactivity.  On  the 
plantations  it  is  the  women  who  are  most  certainly 
degenerating.  They  will  not  work  in  the  fields  any 
more,  so  that  the  earning  capacity  of  the  family 
is  decidedly  reduced.  They  have  even  stopped  tak 
ing  care  of  the  little  garden  patch  which  is  the  salva 
tion  of  the  household  when  the  salt  pork  runs  low, 
and  to  all  intents  and  purposes  seem  determined  to 
become  mere  dusky  butterflies  of  existence. 

This  degeneracy  among  the  women  is  giving  a 
great  deal  of  concern  to  those  white  people  who 
have  the  best  interests  of  the  negro  at  heart,  and 
the  lack  of  character  among  the  women  of  the 


60  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

plantation  class  is  not  a  thing  which  can  readily  be 
described.  Few  of  them  are  married  more  legally 
than  they  were  during  the  slavery  days.  In  some 
cases  they  are  induced  to  go  through  the  ceremony 
by  the  promise  of  a  more  or  less  public  wedding, 
but  even  then  the  matrimonial  tie  is  never  the  tie 
that  binds  on  a  plantation.  Both  men  and  women 
drift  apart  without  much  ceremony,  and  one  can 
frequently  find  a  family  of  half  a  dozen  little  chil 
dren  of  various  degrees  of  blackness,  all  owning 
a  common  mother,  but  each  permitted  to  claim  an 
entirely  different  paternal  ancestor.  The  cabins  on 
the  plantation  are  built  for  two  grown  people  and 
an  indefinite  number  of  children,  but  the  heads  of 
the  household  shift  about  in  a  remarkable  fashion, 
and  even  when  a  husband  and  wife  live  together 
nominally,  serious  scandals  are  generally  set  afloat 
in  the  community  regarding  both  parties  to  the  con 
tract. 

The  white  people  find  it  impossible  to  regulate  this 
matter  at  all.  One  pious  woman  insisted  that  she 
would  not  have  any  grown  negroes  on  her  planta 
tion  who  could  not  produce  a  marriage  license.  She 
was  quite  firm  until  the  superintendent  told  her  that 
it  would  cost  her  about  two  hundred  tenants,  and 
as  it  would  be  so  difficult,  if  not  impossible,  to  sup 
ply  their  places,  the  overseer  would  feel  obliged  to 
resign. 

Yet  with  all  their  debauchery,  with  all  their  lack 


The  Problem  of  Environment         61 

of  real  domestic  ties,  with  all  their  pilfering,  their 
lying,  and  their  manifold  shiftlessness,  the  planta 
tion  darkies  in  Louisiana  are  the  happiest,  most  con 
tented  people  in  the  world.  They  make  no  com 
plaints  of  their  treatment,  and  their  desires  and 
ambitions  are  few.  When  I  asked  one  of  the  most 
intelligent  foremen  on  one  of  the  plantations  what 
was  the  nicest  thing  to  have,  he  promptly  declared 
that  it  would  be  six  bottles  of  whiskey. 

The  ground  in  this  vicinity  is  so  extravagantly 
rich  that  some  sort  of  a  crop  can  be  produced  with 
the  slightest  effort.  The  country  is  entirely  cut  up 
with  bayous  and  lakes,  which  are  filled  with  fish. 
Fuel  is  free  to  the  negro,  he  can  keep  his  own  cow 
and  chickens,  he  has  his  own  garden  patch,  and  if 
he  works  at  all  it  is  only  because  the  white  man 
pushes  him  into  it. 

The  negro  "  cabin  "  is  not  really  a  cabin  at  all,  as 
most  people  think  of  it,  but  a  one-story  cottage.  It 
is  not  built  of  logs,  nor  is  it  a  hut;  it  is  a  house 
built  upon  piles,  weather-boarded,  shingled,  with  a 
roof  sloping  both  ways,  front  and  back.  It  gen 
erally  has  a  porch,  or  "  gallery  "  as  the  South  calls 
it,  across  the  entire  front.  Inside  there  is  only  one 
room,  with  a  pretty  good-looking  wooden  bed,  a 
bureau  with  a  looking-glass,  but  not  much  other 
furniture.  These  articles,  which  constitute  the  bed 
room  part  of  the  house,  are  generally  purchased 
about  Christmas  time,  when  the  family  has  its  an- 


62  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

nual  settlement  with  the  planter.  They  are  bought 
in  the  nearby  town,  for  cash,  and  though  slightly 
better  than  the  rest  of  the  house  would  justify  are 
not  really  an  extravagance,  since  they  consume  only 
a  part  of  the  annual  profits.  The  rest  is  spent  for 
a  grand  debauch,  lasting  from  two  days  to  a  week. 

The  plantation  negro  seems  to  have  a  weakness 
for  a  big  wooden  bed,  "  Wagner  pants,"  a  fashion 
able  hat,  and  a  yellow  dog.  Beyond  these  posses 
sions,  his  sentiments  and  desires  are  entirely  ca 
pricious.  On  Sundays  and  in  the  evenings  most  of 
the  family  spend  their  time  on  the  gallery,  talking, 
laughing  in  the  loudest  of  voices,  and  exchanging 
plantation  wit, — which  is  really  sometimes  funny, — 
with  their  callers,  who  seldom  come  into  the  house 
or  even  upon  the  gallery,  but  generally  stand  out 
side  to  talk  to  the  family  within.  On  most  planta 
tions  the  negro  cabins  are  huddled  together  along 
the  main  road.  Few  of  the  negroes  will  consent  to 
be  put  down  into  the  middle  of  a  square  section  of 
forty  acres  they  may  have  leased.  They  declare 
it  is  "  too  lonesome " ;  and  so  the  cabins  which 
were  once  placed  in  that  way  have  had  to  be  moved 
up  to  the  main  road,  and  the  little  leaseholds  have 
been  changed  into  narrow  strips.  The  negro  is  a 
gregarious  animal,  and  he  has  absolutely  refused  to 
live  in  any  way  except  with  an  abundance  of  next- 
door  neighbours. 

From  his  own  point  of  view  the  plantation  darkey 


The  Problem  of  Environment         63 

is  certainly  "  living  easy,"  as  he  himself  calls  it. 
There  is  never  any  very  cold  weather,  and  there  is 
an  abundance  to  eat  for  every  one.  Any  able- 
bodied  negro  man  can  have  for  the  asking  as  many 
acres  of  land  as  he  can  possibly  cultivate.  He  will 
be  given  a  house  free,  and  allowed  for  his  own 
use  a  plot  of  garden  ground.  He  will  be  furnished 
with  all  his  implements  and  given  the  use  of  a  mule 
to  cultivate  his  little  leasehold.  He  has  the  use  of 
a  plantation  mule  and  wagon  to  haul  his  supply  of 
fuel,  and  the  overseer  will  probably  have  to  make 
him  do  the  hauling  before  the  cold  weather  comes. 
With  a  garden  and  free  fuel,  an  energetic  negro 
can  keep  the  wolf  from  the  door,  if  he  worked  at 
nothing  else,  but  in  return  for  his  work  in  the  field 
he  is  paid  in  cash  twenty-five  cents  per  day,  or  is 
allowed,  at  his  option,  half  of  the  crop.  Practically 
the  only  rations  he  draws  from  the  plantation  are 
salt  meat,  tobacco,  and  salt.  These  are  deducted 
from  his  wages,  of  course,  but  they  do  not  form 
a  very  large  item,  because  the  negro  will  not  eat 
fresh  meat,  as  a  rule,  and  very  little  of  it  even  when 
salted. 

Out  in  the  country  beyond  Indianola,  Mississippi, 
I  made  the  acquaintance  of  the  rural  negro  at  work. 
He  is  not  a  particularly  desirable  friend,  and  he 
has  learned  by  bitter  experience  that  few  white 
men  care  to  be  friends  with  him.  His  conversation 
is  in  its  own  way  strictly  Biblical,  being  confined 


64  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

for  the  most  part  to  "  Yes,  boss,"  and  "  No,  boss." 
These  negroes  in  the  field  do  not  look  downtrodden 
or  abused.  On  the  whole,  they  were  dressed  for 
their  work  about  as  well  as  the  average  farm  la 
bourer  in  the  North.  The  presence  of  women  in 
the  cotton  fields  adds  a  picturesqueness  to  the  coun 
try  which  one  misses  in  the  North,  because  the  col 
oured  women  relieve  the  blackness  of  their  faces  by 
the  radiance  of  their  attire,  and  there  is  none  so 
poor  as  not  to  have  an  effective  turban  or  a  brilliant 
apron. 

The  most  casual  contact  with  the  negro  in  the 
fields,  however,  demonstrates  his  immense  inferior 
ity  to  the  foreign  labourer  of  the  Middle  and  West 
ern  States.  He  is  not  of  the  same  class  at  all ;  and 
aside  from  all  political  speculation,  and  from  ques 
tions  of  abstract  right  or  wrong,  it  must  be  admitted 
that  the  Southern  plantation  negro  must  necessarily 
be  treated  in  a  different  way,  politically  and  so 
cially,  from  the  foreign  labourer  of  the  North.  The 
negro  in  the  fields  and  along  the  roadside  is  as  good- 
natured  a  peasant  as  the  sun  ever  shone  upon.  He 
is  almost  childishly  happy;  he  is  the  best  common 
labourer  in  the  world,  certainly  for  so  hot  a  climate ; 
he  does  not  much  care  to  vote.  He  makes  an  ex 
cellent  labourer  under  supervision,  but  if  left  to 
himself  will  idle  the  day  away  with  tranquil  com 
placency.  He  is  densely,  hopelessly,  predominantly 
ignorant — far  more  ignorant  than  the  census  figures 


The  Problem  of  Environment         65 

would  lead  one  to  suppose.  According  to  the  of 
ficial  returns,  about  one-third  of  the  American  ne 
groes  can  neither  read  nor  write.  But  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  when  the  questions  of  the  census  enumera 
tors  were  answered,  many  negro  families  were  put 
down  as  able  to  read  and  write,  whereas  in  many 
cases  the  only  one  thus  accomplished  in  the  whole 
family  was  a  child,  whose  gifts  in  that  line  were 
probably  not  more  striking  than  those  to  be  wit 
nessed  in  the  lowest  grade  of  a  city  grammar  school. 
The  illiteracy  of  the  negro,  however,  cannot  be 
compared  to  that  of  the  most  densely  ignorant 
whites  who  come  to  the  North  as  immigrants  from 
Europe.  The  negroes  have  an  ignorance  all  their 
own,  entirely  aside  from  their  inability  to  read  and 
write.  It  is  the  ignorance  of  childhood,  of  un 
adulterated  barbarism,  but  not  of  savagery.  Few 
of  them  know  how  old  they  are;  they  cannot  re 
member  things  a  few  years  back;  their  notions  of 
the  government  are  of  the  vaguest  possible  char 
acter  ;  they  make  contracts  with  the  white  men  with 
out  the  slightest  conception  of  their  meaning,  and 
they  break  those  contracts  whenever  it  is  their  in 
clination  to  do  so.  The  ignorance  of  the  field  ne 
groes  is  almost  incomprehensible  to  the  average 
Northern  man.  Yet  they  are  not  vicious;  they  are 
unmoral  rather  than  immoral ;  and  there  is  no  doubt 
of  their  susceptibility  to  education  and  refinement. 
They  are  human  in  every  respect,  and  their  ig- 


66  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

norance  is  not  because  of  their  race,  but  because  they 
have  never  had  an  opportunity  to  learn  anything 
at  all,  either  from  books,  from  their  parents,  or 
from  close  observation  of  white  men.  There  is 
plenty  of  good  raw  material  in  the  negro,  though  at 
present  the  plantation  blacks  are  a  threat  to  the  com 
munity  in  which  they  exist  just  as  any  other  large 
body  of  ignorance  would  be.  In  a  county  where 
not  one  per  cent  of  the  negroes  have  an  ordinary 
common  school  education,  even  though  they  are  not 
naturally  vicious,  they  are  so  suspicious  of  the  white 
man  and  so  easily  led  by  the  few  half -educated  men 
of  their  own  race,  that  there  is  a  good  deal  of  justi 
fication  for  the  belief  that  unless  their  ignorance  is 
alleviated  by  a  far  wider  application  of  the  public 
school  system  than  the  South  has  shown  any  dis 
position  to  adopt,  the  time  must  come  when  by 
mere  force  of  numbers  the  black  man  will  drive  the 
white  man  out  of  the  plantation  districts,  as  he  has 
already  driven  him  out  of  the  cotton  country  in 
Dallas  County,  Alabama. 

It  was  in  this  same  Yazoo  delta  of  Mississippi, 
where  the  picturesque  Sunflower  County  lies,  and 
where  there  are  three  negroes  to  every  white  per 
son,  that  the  results  of  the  outnumbering  of  whites 
by  blacks  were  most  apparent  to  me.  In  the  rural 
districts,  the  proportion  at  the  time  of  my  visit  was 
at  least  ten  to  one,  while  in  some  "  beats,"  which 
is  the  Mississippi  name  for  townships,  the  ratio 


The  Problem  of  Environment         67 

runs  up  to  a  hundred  to  one.  The  marvellous 
growth  of  the  negro  population  here  is  almost  en 
tirely  due  to  emigration  from  other  sections.  The 
fertile  bottomlands  have  become  a  sort  of  paradise 
for  the  negroes.  A  large  part  of  the  old  wilderness 
has  of  late  years  been  broken  up  into  cotton  planta 
tions,  whose  richness  is  not  exceeded  by  that  of 
any  other  section,  save  the  Sea  Island  cotton  fields. 
The  whole  country  is  intersected  by  bayous,  and  the 
development  of  railroads  has  furnished  an  easy  mar 
ket.  Cotton  compresses  and  cotton-seed  oil  mills 
have  gone  up  all  over  this  country.  The  immediate 
result  is  the  large  inrush  of  negro  population  into 
the  Yazoo  delta,  and  a  demand  for  plantation  la 
bour  which  has  made  necessary  the  importation  of 
negroes  from  Alabama  and  Georgia. 

This  is  the  cause.  Now  for  the  effect.  Situated 
as  they  are  in  an  overwhelming  sea  of  black  men, 
their  wives  and  children  at  the  mercy  of  the  good 
nature  of  the  negro,  the  white  people  have  fallen 
into  the  habit  of  going  armed,  and  pistols  are  far  too 
common.  For  example,  I  watched  one  day  half 
a  dozen  young  white  men,  idlers  of  the  ordinary 
country  village  type,  who  drifted  into  the  Indianola 
drug  store.  While  they  were  amusing  themselves 
with  the  usual  rustic  horse-play,  I  counted  no  less 
than  four  protuberances  in  hip  pockets — coats  are 
not  worn  in  Indianola  in  the  middle  of  the  day. 
One  of  the  young  fellows  reached  into  another 


68  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

young  man's  pocket,  withdrew  from  it  a  loaded  re 
volver,  and  flourished  it  about  in  the  drug  store, 
without  either  the  bystanders  or  the  proprietor  see 
ing  anything  unusual  in  the  proceeding,  though  in 
any  law-abiding  Northern  community  the  act  would 
have  resulted  in  immediate  arrest. 

This  habit  of  carrying  pistols  may  be  a  necessary 
protection  to  the  life  and  property  of  the  whites, 
and  it  would  not  do  much  harm,  perhaps,  if  they 
were  all  conservative  and  temperate  men  of  mature 
age.  In  point  of  fact,  however,  many  young  men 
in  the  South  who  have  not  reached  the  age  of  dis 
cretion,  and  above  all  who  are  accustomed  to  the 
use  of  strong  beverages  at  certain  times,  either  carry 
pistols  constantly,  or  at  least  own  and  keep  weapons 
in  the  house.  As  a  result,  the  negro,  with  his  imi 
tative  tendency,  has  begun,  as  I  have  already  said, 
to  carry  his  pistol,  too.  This  is  merely  the  usual 
result  of  the  pistol-carrying  habit,  as  will  be  recog 
nized  by  any  one  who  has  studied  conditions  in  the 
far  West  during  the  earlier  days.  If  a  few  men 
in  a  community  begin  to  carry  pistols,  their  power 
for  good  or  evil  over  their  associates  is  increased 
so  enormously  that  the  others  are  obliged  to  carry 
pistols,  too.  The  inevitable  result  is  that  where  all 
men  are  armed  there  is  no  disparity  between  their 
fighting  qualities,  and  they  are  no  better  off  than 
if  no  one  was  armed. 

Indianola  is  the  town  which  years  ago  achieved 


The  Problem  of  Environment         69 

an  unsavoury  reputation  as  a  "  town  without  a  post- 
office."  At  that  time  the  impression  went  abroad 
that  the  white  people  of  the  town  were  lawless,  and 
wholly  unjust  to  the  negro.  Yet  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  at  the  time  of  my  visit  the  negroes  passed 
through  the  streets  as  unmolested  as  in  other  cities ; 
and  I  learned  that  the  enforced  resignation  of  the 
negro  post-mistress  was  not  due  to  race  prejudice. 
It  was  but  natural  that  the  white  population  of  the 
place,  which  does  fully  ninety-five  per  cent  of  all  the 
business  in  the  local  post-office,  should  resent  the 
appointment  to  the  position  of  a  negro  girl,  solely 
at  the  dictation  of  a  Republican  referee  in  Jackson. 
Moreover,  the  negroes  got  into  the  habit  of  congre 
gating  about  the  post-office,  although  not  one  of 
them  in  a  hundred  had  any  business  there,  and  white 
women  and  children  were  frequently  made  the  ob 
jects  of  unpleasant  comment  by  the  post-office 
loungers.  This  seems  a  small  thing  to  Northern 
people,  but  in  the  South,  where  the  prejudices  of 
the  white  people  must  be  regarded,  the  constant  and 
daily  annoyance  to  women  and  children  is  a  factor 
which  even  a  great  government  might  take  into  con 
sideration. 

Around  the  streets  of  Indianola  the  visitor  is 
likely  to  meet  an  unfortunate  negro  known  as 
"  Will,"  whose  case  is  a  proof  that  the  now  almost 
forgotten  post-office  affair  was  no  evidence  of  bitter 
feeling  on  the  part  of  the  whites  toward  their  black 


70  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

neighbours.  I  could  not  discover  that  Will  had  any 
other  name.  My  informant,  a  well-to-do  and  com 
municative  woman,  said  casually : 

"  I  don't  guess  these  niggers  don't  never  have 
any  more'n  one  name,  nohow/' 

Be  that  as  it  may,  while  still  a  young  man  Will 
had  both  his  arms  caught  in  a  cotton  gin,  so  that 
they  had  to  be  amputated  at  the  elbows.  When  he 
had  sufficiently  recovered  from  the  accident  to  get 
about  the  town,  he  went  to  the  county  supervisors 
and  applied  for  some  little  charity.  They  informed 
him  they  could  do  nothing  for  him  under  the  law 
except  send  him  to  the  county  poor  farm,  a  place 
of  horrors,  as  poor  farms  always  are,  whether 
north  or  south  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line.  Poor 
Will  looked  the  supervisor  in  the  face,  looked  down 
at  his  mutilated  arms,  brightened  up  a  bit,  and  with 
a  flash  of  unwonted  determination  said,  "  Well, 
boss,  I  'low  I'd  ruther  starve.  I  'low  I'll  hustle 
round  a  li'l  bit,  an'  see  ef  dar  ain't  nothin'  a  nigger 
widout  no  arms  kin  larn  t'  do." 

So  Will  hustled  round.  He  learned  to  do  marvel 
lous  things  without  any  arms.  I  saw  him  driving 
a  horse  down  the  street  with  ithe  reins  fastened  in 
some  mysterious  way  to  his  stumps  of  arms.  He 
can  vault  a  fence,  and  he  can  pull  a  child's  express- 
wagon  after  him,  and  withal  is  as  good-natured  as 
the  day  is  long.  Will  has  become  a  wonder  in  the 
number  of  things  he  can  do,  and  the  town  people, 


The  Problem  of  Environment         71 

recognizing  his  determination  and  worth  of  char 
acter,  rewarded  him  when  the  opportunity  came. 
They  drove  Minnie  Cox,  the  negro  woman,  out  of 
the  local  post-office  because  she  permitted  idlers  of 
her  own  race  to  congregate  about  her  office;  but, 
on  the  other  hand,  these  same  queer  people  of  In- 
dianola,  bearing  no  apparent  malice  against  the  race, 
forthwith  appointed  Will,  the  negro  without  hands, 
to  carry  the  mail  from  Heathman,  three  miles  up 
the  Southern  Railroad,  to  which  all  letters  for  In- 
dianola  were  directed.  Will  has  a  public  occupa 
tion  and  is  paid  by  voluntary  contribution  of  the 
citizens.  History  seems  to  suggest  a  phase  of 
Southern  character  which  Northern  students  of  the 
negro  question  would  do  well  to  study. 

The  salvation  of  the  State  of  Mississippi,  as  of 
the  other  Southern  States,  rests  in  the  education  of 
its  negroes.  Yet  at  the  time  I  was  there  a  man 
was  running  for  governor  who,  they  told  me,  would 
be  elected,  on  a  platform  which  involved  the  division 
of  the  State  school  fund,  thus  leaving  the  negro  to 
provide  for  his  own  education.  Such  a  plan  means 
fewer  schools  for  the  negroes  and  more  pistols  for 
the  whites,  until  in  the  fulness  of  time  Mississippi 
shall  become  all  black  and  all  ignorant.  It  is  a  short 
sighted  policy  at  best,  but  the  school  problem  in  the 
South  is  something  which  requires  more  than  casual 
study. 


A  STUDY  OF  EXISTING 
CONDITIONS 


The  Economic  Problem  in  the  Black  Belt 

THE  word  "  peonage  "  would  be  understood 
by  few  of  the  planters  and  by  none  of  the 
negroes  of  the  black  belt  of  Georgia,  Ala 
bama,  and  Mississippi;  yet  the  thing  itself  exists  all 
about  them.  Involuntary  servitude,  always  of  black 
men  to  white  masters,  has  long  been  the  rule,  not 
only  in  these  States  but  in  almost  every  strictly 
agricultural  county  throughout  the  real  cotton  belt. 
The  planters  and  the  negroes  call  it  by  very  different 
names,  but  the  involuntary  servitude  exists  none  the 
less,  accompanied  in  many  painful  instances  not  only 
by  restraint  of  the  liberty  of  the  individual,  but  by 
personal  violence  and  by  the  degradation  of  the  lash. 
Though  investigations  have  been  set  on  foot  of  late 
years,  and  efforts  made  to  correct  by  law  some  of 
the  most  flagrant  evils,  nevertheless  a  barbarous 
system  has  grown  up  under  cover  of  the  authority 
of  the  State  law,  but  in  open  defiance  of  the  con 
stitution  of  the  United  States.  Contract  labour 
laws  which  sanction  imprisonment  for  debt  and  per 
mit  the  involuntary  servitude  of  human  beings  are 
most  certainly  unconstitutional. 

75 


j6  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

Ask  the  most  honest  planter  whether  legalized 
slavery  exists  in  his  section.  He  would  probably 
deny  it,  and  his  denial  would  be  frank  enough,  from 
his  point  of  view.  He  would  explain  the  conditions 
on  his  own  plantation  by  declaring  that  he  merely 
enforced  discipline,  held  his  negro  labourers  to  the 
performance  of  their  contracts,  and  in  other  direc 
tions  acted  strictly  under  the  State  laws,  without 
which,  he  would  tell  you,  it  would  be  impossible 
either  to  control  the  negroes  or  to  operate  the  plan 
tation.  Yet  at  the  same  time  the  slightest  investiga 
tion  will  establish  the  fact  that  whenever  one  gets 
away  from  the  larger  towns,  the  railroad  stations, 
and  the  telegraph  offices,  the  negroes  on  all  the  large 
plantations  operated  by  white  men,  and  in  some 
cases  on  those  managed  by  negroes  themselves,  are 
slaves  in  everything  but  name. 

There  are  miles  upon  miles  of  the  best  cotton 
country  in  the  world  where  the  black  people  are 
subjected  to  "  discipline  "  so  severe,  so  brutal,  and 
so  effective  that  they  are  compelled  to  do  exactly  as 
the  owner  of  the  plantation  orders  them  to  do. 
Nominally  they  are  free,  but  actually  they  are 
slaves.  They  cannot  leave  the  plantation  and  go  to 
work  elsewhere ;  they  cannot  board  a  railroad  train 
without  permission;  they  cannot  decide  for  them 
selves  whether  they  are  too  sick  to  work  or  not; 
and,  in  many  cases,  refusal  to  work,  running  away, 
and  similar  offences,  which  in  the  North  are  con- 


Economic  Problem  in  the  Black  Belt      77 

sidered  as  the  most  ordinary  privileges  of  a  free 
man,  are  punished  with  the  lash  or  the  buggy  trace, 
which  seems  to  be  the  favourite  machine  for  pro 
ducing  "  discipline." 

There  are  almost  as  many  phases  of  this  twenti 
eth-century  slavery  as  there  are  of  the  negro  ques 
tion  itself.  In  different  communities  throughout  the 
black  belt  different  devices  are  resorted  to,  which 
depend  largely  upon  the  character  of  the  white  pop 
ulation,  although  in  each  case,  whatever  the  method, 
the  disastrous  result  to  the  negro  is  practically  the 
same.  "  Peonage "  has  been  generally  taken  to 
mean  the  creation  of  a  condition  of  legal  slavery  as 
a  result  of  a  conviction  for  crime,  without  subject 
ing  the  offender  to  confinement  in  a  convict  camp. 
This  trick  is  resorted  to  largely,  if  not  entirely,  by 
the  meanest,  the  most  unscrupulous  white  classes 
of  the  South.  It  is  the  "  pore  white  trash,"  the  old 
overseer  element,  which  resorts  to  this  disreputable 
method  under  colour  of  law,  but  generally  in  viola 
tion  of  the  State  statutes  themselves. 

As  conditions  were  at  the  time  of  my  investiga 
tions,  the  method  worked  somewhat  as  follows : 
The  negro  would  be  charged  by  the  white  man  with 
some  insignificant  offence,  and  fined  an  amount, 
enormous  out  of  all  proportion  to  the  crime.  Or, 
by  a  still  better  trick,  the  negro  would  be  charged 
with  having  made  threats  of  violence,  and  put  under 
bond  by  a  too  friendly  magistrate.  Then  the  white 


78  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

man,  who  had  really  provoked  the  entire  prosecu 
tion,  would  step  in  and  offer  to  go  on  the  negro's 
bond  or  to  pay  his  fine.  In  such  a  case  the  de 
fendant  would  hire  himself  out  to  the  payer  of  the 
fine,  the  contract  being  made  in  the  open  court  so 
as  to  have  the  approval  of  the  magistrate.  Under 
such  a  contract,  the  man  who  paid  the  fine  or  who 
assumed  the  bond  could  hold  the  labourer  in  his  em 
ploy  until  the  debt  thus  created  and  acknowledged 
in  open  court  was  satisfied. 

Of  course,  there  might  be  times  when  such  a  pro 
ceeding  would  be  entirely  humane,  and  when  the 
negro  would  gladly  resort  to  it  to  escape  the  terrors 
of  a  convict  camp.  But  it  is  obvious  that  even  when 
such  a  system  is  honestly  administered,  and  the  scant 
safeguards  the  law  has  thrown  about  it  are  fully 
observed,  the  ignorant  negro,  who  can  neither  read 
nor  write,  who  has  no  roof  over  his  head,  no  food 
to  put  into  his  mouth,  and  no  ballot  to  redress  his 
wrongs,  invariably  gets  the  worst  of  it.  The  "  pore 
white  trash  "  element,  however,  are  not  satisfied 
with  this  large  gamblers'  percentage,  and  so  have 
gone  outside  of  and  beyond  the  law.  Having  se 
cured  the  negro  as  a  contract  labourer,  they  have 
interpreted  the  law  to  mean  that  every  subsequent 
advance  to  the  negro  in  cash  or  goods  is  part  of 
the  original  contract,  and  must  be  worked  out  by 
involuntary  servitude  in  the  same  way.  Further 
more,  a  custom  has  grown  up  of  making  these  con- 


Economic  Problem  in  the  Black  Belt     79 

tracts  entirely  outside  the  court,  so  that  the  negro 
has  not  even  the  protection  of  a  white  magistrate. 

Trumped-up  charges  and  collusion  with  unscrupu 
lous  justices,  combined  with  an  unfair  and  unmanly 
trading  upon  the  gross  ignorance  of  the  negro,  have 
resulted  in  transferring  many  of  the  black  men  into 
actual  and,  as  they  believe,  perfectly  legal  slavery, 
which  they  have  chosen  in  preference  to  the  ad 
mitted  misery  of  a  convict's  life.  This  kind  of 
peonage  is  chiefly  built  up  on  fraud,  violence,  and 
misrepresentation.  There  is  a  second  sort  of  peon 
age,  however,  which  has  grown  up  through  no  un 
fair  application  of  the  criminal  law,  but  under  the 
regular  contract  labour  law  which  at  the  time  of 
which  I  write  was  in  force  in  Georgia  and  Ala 
bama. 

Throughout  all  the  rural  cotton  counties  of  those 
States  and  others,  the  system  of  contracts  for  la 
bour  has  long  been  used  by  large  white  planters  and 
many  negro  planters  as  well.  Under  the  contract 
labour  law,  the  planter  makes  written  agreements 
with  as  many  labourers  as  he  may  need.  These 
contracts  are  generally  signed  immediately  after  the 
holidays,  and  run,  as  a  rule,  until  after  the  cotton 
is  "  set  aside,'*  which  is  the  ordinary  expression  for 
the  conclusion  of  the  period  of  cultivation.  Now, 
if  at  the  most  only  one-third  of  the  negroes  in 
America  can  read  and  write,  it  is  obvious  that  these 
ignorant  plantation  negroes  are  hardly  equipped  to 


8o  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

sign  their  names.  They  sign  the  contract  as  people 
sign  an  election  petition  in  long  rows  below  a 
printed,  or,  more  often,  a  badly  written  caption  at 
the  top  of  the  sheet — a  caption  which  they  cannot 
read.  The  signing  takes  place  in  the  plantation 
office,  under  the  oversight  of  the  foreman  or  the 
owner  himself.  The  negro,  when  his  name  is  called, 
steps  up  and  affixes  his  mark  opposite  what  he  is 
told  is  his  name.  No  human  being  could  ever  recog 
nize  that  mark,  least  of  all  could  the  negro  himself 
identify  it.  In  his  gross  ignorance  he  is  at  the 
mercy  of  the  employer. 

In  course  of  time,  however,  the  planters  found 
that  the  negro  invariably  ran  away,  when  he  saw 
that  he  was  unable  to  draw  from  the  plantation  a 
larger  sum  of  money  and  goods  than  that  to  which 
his  contract  up  to  a  given  time  had  entitled  him. 
They  thereupon  secured  action  by  the  legislature, 
enabling  any  planter  to  force  the  contract  labourer 
to  fulfil  the  terms  of  his  agreement  to  the  bitter 
end.  To  protect  the  planter,  what  was  originally 
a  mere  civil  contract  became  a  virtual  imprisonment 
for  debt,  with  the  right  given  to  the  planter  to  use 
force  to  make  the  labourer  \vork  from  January  until 
August,  or  for  any  other  agreed  time.  The  object 
of  this  law  was  not  only  to  secure  to  the  planter 
the  return  of  money  advanced  in  excess  of  the 
amount  earned;  its  larger  intent  was  to  secure  to 
him  the  right  to  make  use  of  the  labourer  and 


Economic  Problem  in  the  Black  Belt      81 

to  control  the  person  of  the  labourer  to  the 
same  extent  when  no  advances  at  all  had  been 
made. 

So  unjust  a  measure  could  not  remain  in  force 
unchallenged.  After  about  two  years  it  was  de 
clared  unconstitutional  by  Judge  Thomas  G.  Jones 
of  Alabama.  And  quite  in  harmony  with  this 
declaration  was  the  charge  made  to  the  Federal 
Grand  Jury  by  Judge  Emory  Speer  of  Georgia  to 
investigate  the  system  of  peonage,  an  utterance 
called  forth  by  the  arrest  of  three  young  planters 
in  Jasper  County,  Georgia.  The  prosecutor  in  the 
case  was  a  negro,  who  alleged  that  he  had  been  held 
in  actual  slavery.  He  had  made  a  contract  to  work 
for  one  of  these  men  from  January  until  August, 
and,  like  all  negroes,  had  obtained  one  advance  of 
money  and  rations  after  another.  All  of  a  sudden 
he  found  himself  in  debt  for  thirty-five  dollars  be 
yond  the  full  amount  of  his  contract,  and  thereupon, 
according  to  the  usual  negro  custom,  skipped  out 
of  the  plantation  during  the  night  and  went  to 
work  for  another  planter,  a  dozen  or  so  miles  away. 
He  was,  of  course,  traced  there;  and  his  employer, 
with  another  man,  drove  after  him  in  a  buggy,  tied 
him  to  the  back  axle,  and  carried  him  back  at  full 
speed;  the  negro  was  dragged  a  part  of  the  way 
and  whipped  incessantly,  both  en  route  and  on  ar 
rival  at  the  old  plantation.  The  negro's  wife  man 
aged  to  get  down  to  Macon,  where  she  swore  out 


82  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

the  necessary  warrants  to  secure  his  release  and  the 
arrest  of  his  captors. 

The  decisions  of  two  such  prominent  judges  of 
course  went  far  toward  modifying  the  abuses  of 
the  contract  labour  system.  This  fact  meant  much 
for  the  liberty  of  the  negro;  for  while  in  the  hands 
of  honest,  conscientious  men  this  peonage  did  not 
work  a  great  amount  of  harm  to  the  negro,  all 
owners  were  not  honest,  many  of  them  were  intem 
perate,  all  were  prejudiced;  and  the  right  to  reclaim 
a  runaway  labourer  involves  the  use  of  an  amount 
of  force  the  measure  of  which  is  estimated  by  the 
white  planter,  and  never  by  the  ignorant,  unfor 
tunate  negro. 

It  may  be  that  there  was  no  loss  of  life  in  exe 
cuting  this  inhumane  and  outrageous  contract  labour 
law;  and  yet  that  is  almost  beyond  belief;  for  the 
brutality  and  the  passion  which  could  enable  one  to 
whip  a  cowering  negro  might  easily  be  carried  to 
a  greater  extreme,  and  an  old  "  nigger  "  more  or 
less  on  a  big  plantation  would  hardly  be  a  matter 
of  comment. 

Whatever  improvement  there  may  have  been  in 
conditions  during  the  last  few  years,  peonage  cer 
tainly  was  in  existence  not  many  years  ago,  for  in 
southwestern  Georgia,  in  Sumter  County,  I  saw  and 
studied  it  in  operation.  This  locality  is  in  the  heart 
of  the  black  belt  and  of  the  cotton  country,  and 
is  sufficiently  removed  from  ordinary  centres  of 


Economic  Problem  in  the  Black  Belt     83 

trade  to  present  the  negro  problem  in  its  best  and 
its  worst  phases.  The  peonage  which  I  saw  here 
was  in  such  modified  form  as  to  be  openly  defended 
by  prosperous  and  liberal  planters,  who,  though 
they  admitted  the  illegality,  the  brutality,  and  the 
downright  wickedness  of  the  system,  yet  declared 
it  to  be  an  economic  necessity,  owing  to  the  fact 
that  in  this  section  the  negroes  outnumbered  the 
whites  three  or  four  to  one,  and  the  well-educated 
whites  fully  ten  to  one. 

Before  giving  the  testimony  of  an  honest  but 
necessarily  anonymous  witness,  it  is  only  fair  to 
both  sides  to  explain  briefly  the  relations  between 
the  two  races  as  regards  population  and  property 
interests.  There  were  in  Sumter  County  at  the 
time  of  my  visit  about  7,500  whites  to  19,000  ne 
groes.  Of  the  farms  of  the  county,  about  half  were 
in  pieces  of  fifty  acres  or  less,  and  no  less  than 
seventy-five  were  plantations  ranging  from  five  hun 
dred  to  several  thousand  acres  apiece.  Almost  five 
hundred  of  the  plantations  were  actually  operated 
by  the  owners  themselves,  and  embraced  the  great 
est  part  of  the  cotton  land  of  the  section.  Around 
these  five  hundred  white  planters  spread  a  negro 
population  of  nineteen  thousand.  Bearing  in  mind 
these  facts,  it  will  be  possible  to  appreciate  the  view 
point  of  the  white  planter,  expressed  to  me  at  first 
hand  by  a  young  man  bearing  a  name  famous  in 
America. 


84  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

This  young  planter  was  born  in  the  South,  edu 
cated  at  Columbia  University,  had  five  years  of 
good  business  training  in  the  North,  and  was  then 
suddenly  called  home  by  the  death  of  his  father. 
Since  then  he  had  managed  the  plantation,  with 
whose  methods  he  had  been  familiar  from  child 
hood.  What  he  told  me  would  shock  a  great 
many  people,  and  yet  he  told  it  with  entire 
frankness,  fully  appreciating  my  own  mission, 
but  believing  implicitly  that  the  severe  methods 
of  government  he  had  adopted  were  absolutely 
necessary  for  the  protection  of  his  life  and 
property. 

"  When  my  father  came  down  into  the  heart  of 
the  cotton  belt,"  said  this  intelligent  and  engaging 
young  planter,  who  had  all  a  Northern  man's 
energy  and  all  a  Southern  man's  delicacy  and  cour 
tesy,  "  this  section  was  just  recovering  from  the 
war.  It  was  during  the  reconstruction  period  and 
the  negroes  were  on  top.  He  had  not  been  in  charge 
of  the  plantation  for  more  than  twenty-four  hours 
when  a  big  salt-water  negro  came  riding  up  on  a 
mule,  armed  with  a  double-barrelled  shotgun.  He 
made  no  bones  of  his  errand,  but  hunting  up  my 
father,  covered  him  with  the  shotgun.  '  White 
man,'  he  said,  '  I'll  give  you  just  thirty  minutes  to 
get  off  this  plantation;  if  you  stay  here  after  that 
time,  I'll  blow  your  head  off.' 

"  This  was   the   kind   of   treatment   which   had 


Economic  Problem  in  the  Black  Belt     85 

driven  every  other  white  man  off  that  plantation  for 
a  year  or  two. 

"  Fortunately,  my  father  managed  to  decoy  the 
negro  off  his  mule,  and  engaged  him  in  conversa 
tion  until  they  were  in  the  vicinity  of  a  brush  heap 
where  his  own  gun  lay.  One  barrel  was  loaded 
with  buck  shot  for  actual  defence,  the  other  barrel 
with  split  peas.  Before  that  salt-water  nigger  knew 
what  had  happened  to  him,  he  got  a  dose  from  the 
left-hand,  or  split-pea  barrel.  It  made  quite  a  bit 
of  a  hole  in  the  darkey's  neck,  but  he  never  gave 
any  more  trouble  from  that  day,  and  he  is  one  of 
the  old-time,  stand-by  darkies  on  the  plantation  at 
this  minute." 

Remembering  that  this  incident  was  merely  one 
of  many  similar  cases  in  the  horrible  times  of  re 
construction  and  carpet-bag  dominion,  I  was  about 
to  dismiss  the  subject,  when  my  young  friend 
began  of  his  own  accord  to  give  me  some  instances 
of  his  own  discipline,  which,  as  he  said,  was  that 
practised  on  every  successful  plantation  in  south 
western  Georgia.  He  said :  "  When  the  bell  rings 
I  expect  all  my  people  to  start  for  the  field. 
Promptness  and  punctuality  in  beginning  work  are 
just  as  essential  in  a  cotton  field  in  Georgia  as  in  a 
cotton  mill  in  Massachusetts,  and  five  minutes  delay 
by  five  hundred  hands  means  a  loss  of  about  four 
days'  time  of  a  single  man.  It  is  this  which  counts. 
Supposing  a  woman  were  behind  the  others  every 


86  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

day  five,  ten,  or  twenty  minutes,  and  you  had  re 
peatedly  remonstrated  with  her  without  effect,  the 
woman  seeming  to  take  pride  in  showing  her  inde 
pendence  of  you,  what  would  you  do  with  her?  " 

"  I  suppose  I  would  have  to  let  her  go,  and  dis 
charge  her  from  my  employ,"  I  said. 

"  Oh,  you  would,  would  you  ?  Well,  suppose  she 
had,  as  most  of  them  have,  about  fifteen  brothers 
and  sisters,  all  married  and  most  of  them  with  chil 
dren,  so  that  the  family  connection  amounted  to 
from  thirty  to  sixty  persons.  Now,  if  all  were  free 
agents,  and  that  woman  were  discharged,  every  one 
of  those  people  would  skip  with  her.  Half  a  dozen 
such  cases  of  discipline  would  paralyze  the  planta 
tion." 

I  readily  admitted  the  economic  problem,  but  in 
nocently  asked,  "  What  did  you  do  about  it?  " 

"  I'll  tell  you  what  I  did.  I  stopped  that  woman 
just  as  she  was  coming  out  of  the  door,  after  all 
the  other  people  had  gone,  and  I  said  to  her :  '  Mi- 
randy,  blankety  blank  your  blank  black  hide,  if 
you're  late  again  to-morrow  I'll  take  you  into  the 
plough  house,  and  I'll  lay  you  out  with  the  buggy 
trace  so  you'll  stay  laid  for  a  good  many  days  to 
come.' ' 

"  But  you  never  did  whip  a  negro,  of  course?" 
I  said. 

"  Yes,  I  have.  We  have  to  do  it  once  in  a 
while.  A  negro  ran  away  from  me  and  hid  on  the 


Economic  Problem  in  the  Black  Belt     87 

next  plantation  eleven  miles  away.  I  went  after 
him  with  my  negro  foreman.  I  took  him  out  of 
a  cabin  with  a  revolver  in  my  hand  and  drove  him 
home.  There  I  took  it  out  of  him  with  the  buggy 
whip,  while  the  negro  foreman  held  him. 

"  That  sounds  shocking  to  you,  no  doubt,  but  I 
am  telling  you  the  fact.  If  you  were  the  only  re 
sponsible  white  man  on  a  plantation,  and  were  sur 
rounded  by  more  than  five  hundred  negroes  of  the 
most  debased  and  ignorant  character,  who  cannot 
be  reached  by  any  moral  suasion,  who  are  influ 
enced  by  neither  gratitude  nor  resentment,  you 
would  go  to  the  field  every  day  with  a  revolver  in 
your  pocket,  just  as  every  one  of  us  planters  is 
forced  to  do;  and  you  would  either  maintain  dis 
cipline  in  the  only  way  the  negro  understands,  or 
else  you  would  give  up  your  plantation  to  your 
creditors,  or  your  executors,  as  the  case  might  be." 

"  Running  away  "  is  a  recognized  offence  in  this 
section.  Just  what  peonage  consists  of  here  I  will 
let  my  young  planter  friend  explain  in  his  own 
words. 

"  We  have  two  ways  of  handling  our  planta 
tions,"  he  said.  "  We  rent  small  sections  of  forty 
acres  each,  and  with  these  go  a  plough  and  a  mule. 
You  know  it  is  figured  out  that  a  mule  can  cultivate 
forty  acres  of  cotton.  In  addition  to  that,  how 
ever,  I  have  about  450  hands  who  work  on  wages. 
These  men  are  paid  nine  dollars  a  month,  in  addi- 


88  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

tion  to  a  fixed  ration  of  food,  which  amounts  to  four 
pounds  of  meat  a  week,  a  certain  percentage  of 
vegetables,  tobacco,  sugar,  flour,  and  some  other 
commodities.  The  cash  wages  used  to  be  eight  dol 
lars  in  addition  to  the  rations,  but  the  price  has 
risen,  owing  to  the  high  rates  for  cotton. 

*  These  negroes  live  on  the  plantation,  are  given 
a  roof  over  their  head,  have  garden  patches,  and 
several  other  more  or  less  valuable  privileges.  They 
invariably  come  to  me  for  small  advances  of  money. 
I  have  to  keep  a  ledger  account  with  every  negro 
on  the  plantation.  If  a  man  has  a  large  family,  his 
ration,  of  course,  is  not  sufficient  and  he  has  to 
draw  more,  the  actual  cost  to  be  deducted  from  his 
cash  wages. 

"  No  negro  on  my  plantation  has  ever  charged 
me  with  getting  him  into  debt  or  with  failing  to 
pay  him  the  entire  sum  stipulated  in  his  contract. 
They  all  make  contracts  with  us  individually.  Not 
one  in  ten  can  sign  his  name,  but  I  write  out  the 
names  and  each  negro  in  my  employ  puts  his  mark 
there  in  the  presence  of  negro  witnesses.  The 
terms  of  the  contract  are  never  in  dispute,  and  it 
is  a  matter  of  pride  with  most  of  us  white  men  that 
no  living  person  shall  be  able  to  say  we  have  taken 
advantage  of  our  negroes. 

"  Now%  when  a  negro  runs  away  and  violates  his 
contract,  leaving  us  in  the  lurch,  not  only  short  of 
his  labour,  but  short  of  the  advances  we  have  made 


Economic  Problem  in  the  Black  Belt     89 

to  him  in  money  and  goods,  what  would  happen  if 
we  depended  simply  and  solely  upon  our  right  to 
sue?  In  the  first  place,  with  450  hands,  before  the 
season  is  out  we  would  have  450  suits,  and  if  we 
won  them  all  we  would  not  be  able  to  collect  forty- 
five  cents,  because  it  is  literally  true  that  the  field 
labourer  has  nothing  in  this  world  except  the  clothes 
on  his  back,  and  he  doesn't  always  have  too  many 
of  them.  The  result  is  that  in  Georgia  and  Ala 
bama  and,  I  believe,  in  other  States,  the  law  recog 
nizes  the  right  of  the  planter  to  reclaim  the  la 
bourer  who  has  left  in  violation  of  his  contract, 
whether  he  be  actually  in  debt  or  not. 

"  Under  any  other  system  you  would  find  it  im 
possible  to  get  in  your  cotton,  because  the  negroes 
at  the  critical  time  would  simply  sit  down  and  refuse 
to  work.  When  they  are  well  we  compel  our  la 
bourers  to  go  to  the  field  by  force.  This  is  the 
truth,  and  there  is  no  use  in  lying  about  it." 

These  are  but  fragments  of  a  conversation  which 
seems  clearly  to  establish  the  fact  that  in  most  of 
the  big  cotton  plantations  in  the  South  the  negro 
is  held  to  labour  under  a  contract.  This  contract 
is  renewable  yearly,  and  at  the  date  when  it  is  re 
newable  the  negro  is  free  to  leave  the  plantation,  as 
he  frequently  does,  although  he  does  not  generally 
go  outside  a  radius  of  a  dozen  miles. 

The  conversation  shows  also  that  the  cotton 
planters,  acting  under  colour  of  State  laws  which 


90  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

have  now  been  declared  unconstitutional,  have  as 
sumed  the  right  to  force  the  negro  labourer  to  live 
up  to  the  terms  of  his  contract,  and  to  reclaim  him 
when  he  runs  away;  and  that  in  extreme  cases  the 
buggy  whip  and  the  buggy  trace  are  resorted  to,  to 
enforce  discipline. 

There  is  a  still  deeper  and  more  painful  infer 
ence  from  the  conversation,  growing  out  of  the 
fact  that  nearly  every  planter,  or  at  least  every 
white  overseer,  goes  to  the  cotton  field  on  horseback 
armed.  It  is  not  too  much  to  suppose  that  there  are 
not  some  negroes  who  will  resist  the  application  of 
force  with  such  force  of  their  own  as  God  has  put 
into  their  athletic  black-skinned  bodies.  So  the  in 
ference  is  painfully  apparent  that  the  white  man  on 
the  horse  with  the  pistol  in  his  pocket  is  now  and 
then  compelled  to  use  it.  Often,  perhaps,  the  com 
pulsion  to  use  the  pistol  is  more  apparent  to  him 
than  to  the  negro. 

I  give  these  facts  without  comment,  as  to  whether 
the  economic  necessity  justifies  the  disregard  of  the 
moral  law  or  not.  However  that  may  be,  these  are 
the  facts,  sad  though  they  be. 


II 


Where  the  White  Planter  Is  the  Negro's 
Friend 

THERE  is  at  least  one  Southern  gentleman 
who  has  not  used  the  contract  labour  sys 
tem  in  managing  his  plantation.  This  is 
Mr.  J.  Adger  Smyth,  for  years  the  broad-minded 
and  effective  mayor  of  Charleston.  His  experience 
in  managing  a  plantation  at  once  for  the  good  of 
his  labourers  and  for  his  own  profit  is  an  interest 
ing  example  of  the  economic  problem  as  complicated 
by  the  negro  question. 

When  the  war  closed,  Mr.  Smyth  found  himself 
the  proprietor  of  a  plantation  with  two  hundred 
and  fifty  slaves.  He  marshalled  them  before  the 
big  house,  and  there,  like  many  another  slave 
holder  throughout  the  South,  read  to  them  Lin 
coln's  Emancipation  Proclamation,  and  told  them 
they  were  free  to  go  where  they  wished. 

Following  upon  this  interesting  sermon,  Mr. 
Smyth  was  at  once  confronted  with  the  problem  of 
how  to  keep  his  negroes  from  starving.  He  had  no 
money ;  the  land  was  exhausted ;  the  coloured  people 
were  hungry,  and  in  spite  of  the  Emancipation  Proc- 

91 


92  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

lamation,  still  looked  to  him  for  food  and  clothes. 
Securing  the  services  of  a  Yankee  sergeant  from  a 
nearby  military  post,  to  guarantee  the  honesty  of 
his  proposition,  Mr.  Smyth  agreed  to  farm  the 
whole  plantation  on  shares.  The  owner  supplied 
the  land,  furnished  the  seed,  the  agricultural  im 
plements,  the  mules,  the  cabins  in  which  the  coloured 
people  lived,  and  every  other  possible  accessory. 
He  had  no  money,  but  he  had  credit,  and  thus  was 
enabled  to  put  the  negroes  in  the  way  to  earn  their 
own  living.  He  took  two-thirds  of  the  receipts  and 
the  negroes  one-third.  In  this  way  the  negro  la 
bourer  received  one-third  of  the  gross  value  of  the 
product  of  his  labour,  entirely  independent  of  other 
expenses,  a  ratio  of  wages  which,  in  theory  at  least, 
is  abundantly  liberal. 

The  outcome  of  this  experiment  might  well  be 
told  by  Mr.  Smyth  himself. 

"  At  the  end  of  four  years,"  he  said,  "  I  found 
myself  $10,000  in  debt  on  the  plantation,  and  as  I 
had  no  means,  I  determined  to  cut  loose  then  and 
there.  I  drew  up  a  sort  of  proclamation  as  nearly 
as  possible  in  official  form,  called  the  darkies  up 
to  the  big  house  again,  just  as  I  had  clone  four 
years  before,  and  told  them  that  this  was  my  eman 
cipation  proclamation,  which  had  freed  me  after 
all.  I  took  a  mighty  oath  then  and  there  I  would 
never  raise  another  bale  of  cotton  on  my  own  hook, 
and  I  never  have. 


White  Planter  the  Negro's  Friend         93 

"  I  then  began  a  new  scheme.  I  rented  the  land 
outright  at  two  dollars  an  acre,  and  have  continued 
this  practice  ever  since.  I  gave  them  free,  of  course, 
all  their  cabins  and  the  usual  gardens  about  them, 
and  made  repairs  on  houses  and  fences  about  the 
plantation.  Out  of  from  four  thousand  to  five  thou 
sand  acres,  I  could  rent  until  recently  only  three 
hundred  acres,  but  this  year  this  amount  has  greatly 
increased,  and  I  shall  be  able  to  have  about  one 
thousand  acres  under  lease." 

This  experience  seems  largely  to  corroborate  the 
testimony  of  the  planter  quoted  in  the  last  chapter, 
to  the  effect  that  a  plantation  can  hardly  be  man 
aged  in  an  altruistic  spirit  and  at  the  same  time 
produce  profits.  So  also  does  the  story  of  the  ex 
perience  of  Mr.  Stone  of  Greenville,  before  alluded 
to,  who  has  been  the  victim  to  a  certain  extent  of 
a  philanthropic  experiment  he  made  for  the  benefit 
of  the  negroes  of  his  own  plantation,  and  who  nev 
ertheless  discusses  more  dispassionately  than  most 
Southerners  the  question  of  the  economic  and  in 
dustrial  relations  of  the  negro. 

"  I  tried  to  force  my  negro  tenants/'  he  said  in 
telling  his  story,  "  to  save  some  money  in  spite  of 
themselves.  I  made  them  the  most  liberal  kind  of 
terms,  and  put  the  whole  transaction  on  a  strictly 
business  basis,  although  my  motives  were  entirely 
in  the  direction  of  helping  the  negroes.  I  gave  them 
one,  two,  and  even  three  years'  time  in  which  to 


94  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

purchase  a  mule  and  the  necessary  farm  implements. 
I  held  them  down  on  all  advances  of  provisions  and 
supplies,  and  did  my  best  to  force  them  to  become 
independent.  I  am  sorry  to  say  that  the  effort  has 
not  been  successful.  I  have  divided  up  sixty-seven 
small  pieces  of  land,  and  in  each  case  made  such 
terms  as  would  enable  the  tenant  with  ordinary  in 
dustry  to  buy  his  own  mule  and  the  necessary  farm 
ing  implements,  so  as  to  render  him  independent  of 
the  owner  of  the  soil  except  for  the  ordinary  ground 
rent. 

"  We  make  our  new  arrangements  with  the  col 
oured  people  along  about  the  holidays,  and  last 
Christmas  no  less  than  seventeen  families  which  I 
had  helped  to  become  independent  no  sooner  found 
themselves  with  a  mule  and  a  little  property  paid 
for,  than  they  left  the  plantation  and  forced  me  to 
seek  new  tenants  and  go  through  the  same  long 
operation  again.  They  were  induced  to  leave  and 
to  go  to  work  on  a  nearby  plantation  which  had 
previously  been  worked  by  convict  labour,  now  be 
ing  withdrawn  to  the  State  camps. 

"  These  negro  tenants  left  without  any  effort  on 
their  part  to  examine  into  their  new  farms,  and 
found  when  it  was  too  late  that  they  were  expected 
to  live  in  huts  which  would  not  keep  out  the  rain 
and  were  not  supplied  with  any  of  the  comforts  to 
which  they  had  been  accustomed.  They  had  a  per 
fect  right  to  go  away,  but  it  seemed  at  least  ungrate- 


White  Planter  the  Negro's  Friend         95 

ful  to  leave  the  planter  who  had  helped  them  to 
independence  without  the  slightest  compunction. 
This  is  generally  the  result  of  almost  every  effort 
honestly  made  by  humane  planters  for  the  better 
ment  of  the  negro." 

Such  a  report  is  discouraging.  Verily,  it  is  hard 
to  choose  between  the  two  horns  of  the  dilemma. 
It  is  a  question  for  the  individual  conscience  to  de 
cide,  whether  to  reap  what  profits  can  be  reaped 
from  the  use  of  force  and  the  consequent  degrada 
tion  of  the  negro,  or  to  sacrifice  the  profits  in  the 
somewhat  chimerical  hope  of  improving  the  negro's 
condition.  That  improvement  would  appear  to  be 
a  matter  for  the  far  future,  even  in  the  hands  of 
the  most  scrupulously  humane  employers ;  yet  surely 
the  planters  who  enforce  their  contract  labour  sys 
tem  by  means  of  whip  and  pistol  are  not  aiding 
greatly  in  the  ultimate  solution  of  the  race  problem 
in  America.  It  is  once  more  a  choice  between  the 
individual  and  the  public  good — the  public  being  in 
this  case  not  the  negro,  but  the  South  itself. 

Anomalous  as  it  may  seem,  this  Yazoo  delta  coun 
try  in  Mississippi  has  a  greater  scarcity  of  labour 
than  the  States  of  Georgia  and  Alabama,  where  con 
tract  labour  and  harder  conditions  are  the  rule.  In 
order  to  supply  the  demand  for  labour  in  this  fer 
tile  cotton  country,  where  it  brings  a  higher  price 
than  almost  anywhere  else,  the  planters  have  been 
compelled  to  send  to  neighbouring  States  for  their 


96  The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

negroes.  In  Georgia  and  Alabama  a  license  tax  of 
some  five  hundred  dollars  is  imposed  in  each  county 
for  agents  who  seek  to  send  negroes  out  of  the 
State.  When  the  tenants  and  field  hands  drift  away 
from  Mississippi,  now  that  the  cotton  area  has  been 
increased  so  largely,  the  planters  are  forced  to  send 
to  the  nearby  States  and  to  pay  the  excessive  rates 
by  which  Alabama  and  Georgia  are  seeking  to  stop 
the  drain  upon  their  negro  population. 

The  outnumbering  of  the  whites  by  the  blacks  is 
not  an  ideal  condition  of  things;  yet  it  is  a  curious 
fact  in  the  South  that  wherever  the  black  men  are 
in  the  greatest  majority  they  appear  to  be  the  most 
docile.  Tensas  Parish,  the  garden  spot  of  Louisi 
ana,  is  a  complete  and  unimpeachable  proof  of  this 
peculiar  condition.  This  section,  where  the  town 
of  St.  Joseph  is  situated,  is  the  heart  of  the  black 
belt  of  the  State.  The  parish  has  about  fifteen  times 
as  many  negroes  as  whites,  yet  a  serious  clash  be 
tween  the  races  is  rarely  heard  of,  the  crime  of  all 
crimes,  which  is  supposed  to  justify  lynching,  is 
equally  unknown,  and  the  relations  between  the  two 
races,  while  essentially  those  of  slavery  days,  are 
cordial,  kindly,  and  sympathetic. 

The  tropical  conditions  here  make  the  country  a 
paradise  for  the  negro.  The  climate  is  about  what 
he  is  accustomed  to;  the  vegetation  is  luxuriant;  a 
living  can  be  had  from  the  generous  soil  with  the 
minimum  of  labour;  and  there  are  abundant  oppor- 


White  Planter  the  Negro's  Friend         97 

tunities  for  the  idle  darkey  to  bask  in  the  sun,  like 
the  alligator  in  the  nearby  swamp.  Around  about 
are  the  pecan  trees  and  the  great  blossoms  of  the 
magnolia;  the  rich  blooms  of  the  crepe  myrtle  and 
the  mimosa  tree;  the  live  oak  and  the  cottonwood 
with  its  blowing  fleece.  In  the  lakes  one  can  find 
with  the  simplest  hook  and  line  the  "  Sac  au  Lait," 
which  is  the  Creole  name  for  the  white  bass ;  while 
spread  over  the  surface  of  the  swamp  are  millions 
and  millions  of  the  "  Monokonut,"  or  sacred  yellow 
lotus.  The  alligator  is  still  to  be  found  in  the  more 
remote  pools,  although  the  rifle  quickly  exterminates 
the  reptiles  in  the  more  accessible  lakes  and  bayous. 
On  the  galleries  of  the  plantation  houses  one  can 
find  the  nest  of  the  mocking-bird,  and  hear  him 
singing  his  most  marvellous  song  on  moonlight 
nights,  while  the  bobolink,  the  cardinal  bird,  and 
myriads  of  the  most  beautiful  humming-birds  are 
seen  at  every  moment. 

It  is  all  so  tropical  and  so  beautiful  that  one 
realizes  why  the  negro  is  so  contented  here, — since 
he  is  indifferent  to  the  drawbacks  of  the  climate — 
the  mosquitoes,  the  miasma  of  the  swamps,  the  de 
pressing  moist  heat,  and  the  swamp  water,  which 
produces  all  sorts  of  disorders  among  civilized  white 
men.  The  vines  which  cover  all  the  trees,  the 
festoons  of  Spanish  moss,  all  the  extravagant  lux 
uriance  of  the  tropical  vegetation  appeal  to  the  ne 
gro  as  nothing  else  can,  satisfying  his  hereditary 


98  The  Negro  and.  His  Needs 

tastes,  teaching  that  a  living  is  to  be  had  with  little 
effort,  and  thus  making  him  what  he  undoubtedly 
is  to-day — hopelessly  ignorant  and  debased,  but 
none  the  less  absolutely  peaceable,  tractable,  con 
tented,  and  happy. 

Tensas  Parish  is  essentially  a  community  of  the 
few  rich  and  the  many  poor.  There  is  neither  pov 
erty  among  the  whites  nor  wealth  among  the  ne 
groes.  There  are  a  few  white  planters  and  thou 
sands  upon  thousands  of  negro  labourers.  The  rela 
tive  proportion  as  between  the  ruling  class  of  whites 
and  the  ruled  class  of  blacks  has  been  altered  but 
little  in  the  last  thirty  years.  The  town  of  St.  Jo 
seph  is  made  up  of  the  residences  of  cultivated, 
prosperous  white  planters,  who  have  gradually 
given  up  the  old  system  of  living  in  isolation  on 
their  own  plantations,  and  have  gathered  here  along 
the  river-banks.  Living  in  this  way,  they  are  in 
connection  by  steamer  with  Natchez  and  Vicksburg, 
and  can  have  ice  and  other  such  civilized  necessities 
landed  at  their  own  doors.  More  than  that,  living 
as  neighbours,  they  secure  the  society  of  people  of 
their  own  class.  Every  one  in  town  is  either  a 
planter  or  indirectly  interested  in  a  plantation;  so 
whenever  a  knot  of  men  gathers  on  a  corner,  their 
conversation  inevitably  turns  to  the  question  of  the 
prospect  of  rain  or  sun,  schemes  for  the  destruction 
of  the  boll  weevil,  and  similar  topics  of  high  im 
portance  on  the  plantations. 


White  Planter  the  Negro's  Friend         99 

The  whole  country  hereabouts  is  below  the  high 
water  level  of  the  Mississippi,  and  it  is  only  the 
great  levee  stretching  along  the  banks  of  the  river 
which  guards  and  protects  the  plantations.  All  this 
section  of  Louisiana  was  once  under  the  sea,  and 
it  is  scarcely  out  of  it  yet.  The  soil  is  as  rich  as 
anything  in  the  world,  not  excepting  the  famous 
delta  of  the  Nile,  because  it  is  made  up  of  the  drain- 
ings  of  the  entire  Mississippi  valley.  No  one  knows 
the  depth  of  this  silt,  which  will  grow  the  most 
marvellous  crops  year  after  year  without  fertiliz 
ing.  A  cotton  crop  is  occasionally  succeeded  by 
one  of  corn  with  peas  sown  between  the  rows,  it 
having  been  found  that  peas  are  amply  sufficient  to 
restore  in  a  single  season  everything  that  the  cotton 
has  taken  away  from  the  composition  of  the  soil. 

These  physical  conditions  bring  about  a  state  of 
affairs  which  is  ideal  for  the  negro,  but  which  at 
the  same  time  renders  the  planter  almost  absolutely 
dependent  upon  black  labour.  There  is  here  not 
the  slightest  reason  in  the  world  why  any  black 
man  of  good  health  should  fail  to  support  his  fam 
ily  with  absolute  abundance.  Northern  friends  of 
the  negro  would  do  well  to  study  this  statement  in 
all  its  bearings.  It  is  not  extravagant  to  say  that  it 
would  be  difficult  to  find  an  able-bodied  man  or 
woman  in  Tensas  Parish  who  has  not  at  his  com 
mand  the  means  of  making  a  livelihood  much  better 
than  that  granted  to  the  average  white  immigrant  in 


TOO         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

any  Northern  State.  This  does  not  mean  that  the 
condition  of  the  negro,  mentally  and  morally,  is  not 
shocking.  But  so  far  as  conditions  in  Tensas  Par 
ish  can  be  considered  at  all  typical,  Northern  philan 
thropy  should  be  extremely  cautious  before  it  dis 
turbs  an  economic  situation  which  is  so  extremely 
satisfactory  to  the  negro  himself.  Great  care  must 
be  exercised  that  in  endeavouring  to  better  his  con 
dition  it  may  not  be  made  worse. 

The  demand  for  agricultural  labour  in  this  section 
is  almost  unlimited.  Thousands  of  acres  of  fertile 
land  are  yet  awaiting  development,  and  the  labour 
supply  is  not  sufficient  to  take  care  of  the  land  al 
ready  under  cultivation.  As  a  result,  the  negro  can 
command  a  good  wage  for  his  labour,  paid  in  al 
most  any  form  he  likes.  Any  negro  who  wants  it 
will  be  given  as  large  a  farm  as  he  desires,  for 
which  he  can  pay  rent  in  cash,  or  part  in  cash  and 
part  in  crops,  or  all  in  crops.  He  can  rent  out  his 
own  labour  for  a  cash  payment  per  day  or  for  part 
cash,  and  in  either  of  these  cases  he  will  be  guar 
anteed  a  roof  over  his  head  and  other  comforts 
which  make  his  living  absolutely  secure.  This  is 
not  an  overdrawn  picture,  nor  is  it  a  presentation  of 
the  white  man's  side  of  the  situation.  It  is  an  abso 
lute  fact  that  any  able-bodied  negro  can  readily  earn 
enough  to  put  by  money  every  year,  if  he  can  be 
taught  habits  of  thrift  and  of  foresight. 

Supposing  a  negro  determines  to  become  a  tenant 


White  Planter  the  Negro's  Friend       101 

farmer.  Every  white  man  in  the  vicinity  will  be 
glad  to  get  him  and  he  will  be  given  his  choice  of 
terms.  That  is  to  say,  a  negro  who  has  not  a  dollar 
in  the  world,  who  has  nothing  at  his  command  be 
side  his  strong  hands  and  his  tropical,  anti-malarial 
constitution,  will  be  given  first  of  all  the  exclusive 
control  of,  say,  forty  acres  of  land,  if  he  can  handle 
that  much.  He  will  be  given  the  use,  free  of  charge, 
of  a  mule,  a  plough,  and  all  necessary  farming  im 
plements.  While  he  remains  on  his  little  farm  he 
will  have  assigned  to  him  a  one-story,  one-roomed 
house  for  his  own  use  and  that  of  his  family.  At 
tached  to  that  will  be  as  large  a  garden  patch  as 
he  desires  to  cultivate  during  his  leisure  hours.  In 
the  vicinity  is  an  abundance  of  wood,  belonging  to 
the  plantation,  which  he  can  have  for  his  own  use, 
and  which  will  cost  him  only  the  trouble  of  cutting 
it  down  and  hauling  to  his  cabin  door.  The  planta 
tion  will  supply  the  axe  for  the  former  and  a  mule 
and  team  for  the  latter.  He  will  be  given  absolute 
permission  to  keep  a  cow  and  as  many  chickens  and 
pigs  as  he  may  desire.  All  the  proceeds  of  his  gar 
den  patch,  of  his  pigs,  his  chickens,  and  his  cow 
are  his  own,  and  the  demand  for  such  products  in 
the  plantation  settlement  among  the  "  white  folks  " 
with  their  big,  fine  houses  always  exceeds  the 
supply. 

All  this  is  what  the  white  man  gives  the  negro. 
In  return  the  negro  gives  absolutely  nothing  at  all 


IO2         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

but  the  labour  of  his  hands.  When  the  crop  of 
cotton  is  safely  ginned  it  is  divided,  one-half  going 
to  the  owner  of  the  soil  and  one-half  to  the  negro. 
If  the  labourer  prefers,  he  can  receive  wages  paid 
to  him  in  cash.  That  is  to  say,  the  planter  will  sup 
ply  the  land,  the  house,  the  fuel,  the  garden  patch, 
the  mule,  and  the  plough,  and  will  take  his  chances 
on  the  crop,  paying  the  negro  in  cash  every  two 
weeks  seventy-five  cents  per  working  day,  and  sixty 
cents  for  his  wife  or  his  full-grown  daughter,  if 
they  choose  to  work  in  the  field. 

If  a  negro  labourer  desires  to  avoid  all  other  re 
sponsibilities,  he  can  secure  ordinary  day  labour  in 
the  cotton  and  the  corn,  and  receive  $1.25  a  day. 
When  one  studies  these  figures  it  is  impossible  to 
escape  the  conclusion  that  the  ordinary,  ignorant, 
improvident,  and  naturally  idle  negro  labourer  is 
immeasurably  better  off  in  Tensas  Parish  than  he 
would  be  in  some  of  the  best  agricultural  sections 
of  the  North.  The  planters  are  seeking  to  encour 
age  tenant  farming.  They  ask  nothing  from  the 
tenant  but  honest  labour.  Plantation  stores  are  not 
always  good  things,  and  they  frequently  sell  liquor 
to  the  negro  when  he  should  not  have  it,  but  on 
the  whole  the  agricultural  labour  in  this  section  is 
not  tied  down  by  unfair  restrictions,  nor  is  there 
anything  in  the  way  of  downright  prosperity,  ex 
cept  the  inherent  constitutional  inability  of  the  ig 
norant  negro  to  look  ahead. 


White  Planter  the  Negro's  Friend       103 

Every  pay  day,  those  who  receive  cash  wages  go 
either  to  the  plantation  store,  to  some  cross-roads 
gin-mill,  or  to  the  county  town  of  St.  Joseph,  and 
there  in  an  incredibly  short  time  dispose  of  almost 
every  penny  of  their  hard-earned  money.  For  this 
reason  it  will  be  seen  that  some  sort  of  a  credit  sys 
tem  on  the  plantation  is  absolutely  indispensable  to 
the  negro.  To  abolish  it  would  mean  beyond  a 
doubt  the  starvation  of  the  negro,  since  in  his  pres 
ent  state  of  mental  development  he  cannot  be 
trusted  to  look  ahead  a  month  or  a  week,  many 
times  not  even  a  day.  The  average  negro  labourer 
on  a  plantation,  if  stocked  up  with  meat  enough  to 
last  him  three  months,  will  either  eat  it  all,  or  waste 
it  all,  or  sell  it  all,  or  gamble  it  all,  or  lose  it  all  in 
some  mysterious  way,  inside  of  the  first  few  weeks, 
and  then  will  beg  for  more.  The  only  safety  for 
this  negro  is  to  draw  his  rations  from  the  smoke 
house  twice  a  week,  and  have  them  charged  to  his 
account. 

The  better  class  of  planters  is  rapidly  coming  to 
the  conclusion  that  it  cannot  cope  with  the  char 
acteristic  improvidence  of  the  negro  until  it  re 
moves  whiskey  altogether  from  his  reach.  This  has 
been  largely  responsible  for  the  rapid  spread  of  pro 
hibition  sentiment  in  the  Southern  States.  In  Louis 
iana,  this  sentiment  first  found  expression  in  a 
voluntary  but  concerted  effort  to  stop  the  sale  of 
whiskey  in  the  plantation  stores  and  confine  it  en- 


IO4         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

tirely  to  the  larger  towns,  so  as  to  make  it  difficult 
for  the  negroes  to  obtain  it. 

This  negro  dissipation  is  a  serious  matter  for 
the  planter.  There  are  times  in  the  cultivation  of 
the  cotton  crop  when  abundant  labour  and  quick 
work  are  indispensable.  If  at  that  particular  time 
a  large  body  of  negroes  sees  fit  to  go  off  on  a  de 
bauch,  the  planter  is  frequently  the  only  loser.  Self- 
interest,  therefore,  has  had  a  part  in  inducing  the 
intelligent  cotton  planter  to  cultivate  friendly  rela 
tions  with  his  black  labour,  not  only  by  helping  them 
to  keep  out  of  debt,  but  also  by  helping  them  at  the 
same  time  to  keep  as  far  away  as  possible  from  the 
whiskey  barrel,  wrhich  to  the  negro,  even  more  than 
to  the  Indian,  is  a  racial  calamity.  The  Indian  gets 
fighting  drunk  and  then  stops  drinking  for  a  while; 
but  the  plantation  negro,  if  allowed  to  have  his  way, 
becomes  a  confirmed  dipsomaniac,  and  can  keep 
away  from  whiskey  only  when  he  has  no  money  to 
buy  it. 

In  the  sugar-growing  sections  of  Louisiana  in 
dustrial  conditions  are  very  similar  to  those  in  the 
cotton  country,  except  that  here  all  the  work  is  done 
by  day  labour.  There  is  no  opportunity  to  estab 
lish  a  tenant  system,  since  so  much  capital  is  in 
volved  in  the  raising  and  marketing  of  sugar  cane. 
The  labourer  in  the  sugar  fields  is  paid  seventy-five 
cents  a  day,  in  the  ordinary  season,  and  his  wife 
sixty  cents,  while  in  the  busy  season  he  receives  at 


White  Planter  the  Negro's  Friend       105 

least  $1.25  a  day,  with  often  seventy-five  cents  extra 
for  half  a  night's  work.  Occasionally  the  prices 
run  even  higher.  Besides  the  cash  wage,  the  la 
bourer  has  the  same  privileges  as  the  cotton  worker, 
as  to  house,  fuel,  stock,  garden  produce,  and  the  use 
of  the  plantation  implements. 

I  was  told  by  Governor  Sanders  of  the  Louisiana 
contract  labour  law  and  its  working.  "  We  have 
neither  credits  nor  contracts  in  the  sugar  country," 
he  said.  "  We  do  not  appeal  to  the  contract  labour 
law  except  in  the  busy  harvest  season,  when  we  have 
to  import  hands  by  thousands  from  Alabama  and 
pay  their  fare.  Then  we  force  them  to  stay  on 
the  plantation  until  they  have  at  least  worked  out 
their  railroad  fare.  None  of  our  planters  run  stores 
any  more.  There  is  a  store  on  each  plantation,  of 
course,  but  it  is  rented  by  a  merchant.  The  planter 
does  not  assume  to  collect  any  debts  for  that  mer 
chant,  although,  as  a  matter  of  convenience,  wages 
are  paid  at  this  store,  where  the  plantation  office  is, 
and  the  merchant  collects  his  debts  then  and  there. 
We  all  pay  cash,  or  what  is  equivalent  to  cash,  and 
on  some  plantations  the  hands  are  paid  every  day, 
the  overseer  giving  out  plantation  pay  checks  for 
the  exact  amount  earned.  These  pay  checks  are  re 
deemed  in  cash  at  least  every  few  weeks,  and  they 
serve  as  currency,  circulating  over  the  parish,  but 
seldom  remaining  unredeemed  over  the  regular  day. 

"  The  prices  in  the  plantation  stores  are  not  ex- 


io6         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

travagant,  since  a  supply  of  labour  always  available 
is  actual  capital  to  any  sugar  planter,  and  we  cannot 
afford  to  have  these  plantation  stores  so  managed 
that  the  negroes  will  leave  us.  So  when  we  find 
that  the  prices  are  too  high,  or  that  the  negroes  are 
encouraged  to  buy  things  they  do  not  really  need,  or 
that  they  are  allowed  to  run  hopelessly  in  debt,  we 
notify  the  merchant  at  once  that  he  must  get  down 
to  the  legitimate  method  or  we  will  rent  the  store 
to  some  one  else.  The  result  is  that  the  prices  in 
our  plantation  stores  are  not  materially  higher  than 
in  the  towns,  except  for  the  slight  advance  caused 
by  the  cost  of  hauling  from  the  railroads,  which  is 
often  a  long  distance,  and  for  which  the  negroes 
would  have  to  pay  themselves  if  they  dealt  in  the 
towns.  These  conditions  of  abundance  of  work  for 
the  negroes,  of  fair  wages,  and  of  decent  treatment, 
with  cash  payment,  make  our  part  of  the  State  a 
paradise  to  the  darkies,  but  what  we  are  going  to 
do  when  the  old-time  negro  disappears,  I  must 
frankly  say  I  do  not  know." 


Ill 

The  Political  Issue 

THE  hysteria  in  the  North  over  the  negro 
question  is  most  often  aroused  by  the  po 
litical  situation  in  the  South.  But  with  all 
its  iniquities,  with  all  its  injustice  to  the  black  man, 
this  same  political  situation  is  one  which  should 
not  be  rashly  disturbed.  "  Go  slow  "  is  the  best 
possible  motto  for  the  statesman  both  North  and 
South,  when  dealing  with  any  of  the  curious  po 
litical  aspects  of  the  race  question.  Without  deny 
ing  that  there  is  great  opportunity  for  improvement, 
it  is  none  the  less  true  that  the  Northern  enthusiast 
or  the  Southern  conservative  who  assumes  rashly 
to  disturb  existing  political  conditions  in  the  South 
must  perhaps  take  the  responsibility  of  inflicting 
vast  harm  upon  the  entire  country. 

I  doubt  if  there  is  a  first-class  hotel  in  any  large 
Northern  city  which  could  make  a  practice  of  re 
ceiving  negro  guests  and  keep  out  of  bankruptcy. 
Yet  in  these  same  Northern  communities,  where, 
very  properly,  the  negro  is  not  granted  the  slightest 
semblance  of  social  equality,  the  demand  is  con 
stantly  made  that  the  South  shall  permit  him  to 

107 


io8         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

vote  and  hold  important  offices,  which  would  of 
necessity  involve  him  in  constant  association  with 
the  white  people.  The  people  of  the  North  must 
divest  themselves  of  the  idea  that  the  welfare  of 
the  negro  is  for  the  present  at  least  in  any  way  con 
nected  with  the  exercise  of  the  right  of  suffrage. 

The  Mecca  of  the  Southern  negro  to-day  is 
Washington.  Why  is  this?  Neither  negroes  nor 
whites  vote  in  the  District  of  Columbia.  The  white 
and  black  children  are  provided  with  separate 
schools,  and  the  lines  between  the  two  races  are 
drawn  with  a  care  entirely  unknown  in  cities  a  few 
degrees  farther  north.  In  New  York  or  Chicago 
the  negro  can  secure  the  unrestricted  right  of  suf 
frage,  and  his  children  can  sit  side  by  side  in  the 
public  schools  with  the  boys  and  girls  of  white  par 
ents.  Yet  the  negro  does  not  hurry  North,  not 
only  because  the  avenues  of  employment  are  not  as 
good  there  as  in  the  South,  but  also  because  in  the 
North  he  is  treated  as  a  man,  and  if  he  does  not 
work  is  apt  to  starve.  Until  the  negroes  gather  in 
sufficient  quantities  in  the  North  to  make  them  an 
important  political  factor,  their  right  of  suffrage 
will  not  appear  particularly  valuable  to  them.  In 
the  Middle  States  and  those  of  the  middle  West,  it 
is  well  known  that  the  negroes  generally  sell  their 
votes  at  every  election,  a  statement  that  cannot  be 
controverted  by  any  well-informed,  frank  politician 
from  either  party.  On  the  other  hand,  in  the  South, 


The  Political  Issue  109 

which  is  governed  exclusively  by  white  men,  my 
own  observation  has  shown  me  that  a  cleaner  state 
of  politics  exists  than  in  the  North.  Vote  buying 
is  not  common,  and  the  average  scale  of  political 
morality  in  the  cotton  States  is  decidedly  high. 

I  do  not  believe  any  intelligent,  fair-minded,  and 
liberal  Northern  man  can  spend  even  a  few  months 
in  an  exclusive  investigation  of  the  race  question 
without  becoming  convinced,  as  I  have  become  con 
vinced,  that  the  granting  of  suffrage  to  the  negroes, 
immediately  after  the  war,  was  a  horrible  blunder. 
For  while  here  and  there  one  may  find  negroes  who 
are  eminently  fitted  to  exercise  the  right  of  suf 
frage,  the  time  has  not  yet  come  when  it  is  safe  to 
give  the  ballot  to  the  illiterate  negro  millions.  It 
is  doubtless  true  that  the  methods  adopted  by  the 
South  to  eliminate  the  negro  from  politics  were  at 
first  generally  cruel,  and  are  now  frequently  uncon 
stitutional,  but  an  honest  survey  of  the  situation 
must  prove  that  they  adopted  the  only  way  to  repair 
the  serious  breach  in  the  social  and  commercial 
fabric  of  the  South,  and  that  the  end  justified  the 
means. 

There  are  educated  negroes,  thousands  of  them, 
not  at  all  confined  to  college  professors  or  philan 
thropists.  The  negro  schools  are  continually  turn 
ing  out  a  class  of  educated  black  men  and  women 
who  are  born  in  America,  who  are  acquiring  prop 
erty  interests,  and  who  have  quite  enough  education 


no         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

to  enable  them  to  make  an  intelligent  use  of  the 
ballot.  It  must  be  remembered  none  the  less  that 
the  great  mass  of  the  negro  population  of  the  South, 
embracing  many  millions  of  men  and  women,  is  not 
only  wholly  unfitted  to  exercise  the  right  of  suf 
frage,  but  if  given  the  ballot  at  this  stage  in  their 
race  history,  would  undoubtedly  become  a  menace 
to  the  welfare  of  the  nation.  There  is  a  vast  deal 
of  difference  between  Professor  DuBois  of  Atlanta 
University  and  the  half -savage  labourer  in  the  rice 
fields  or  the  cotton  islands  on  the  Atlantic  coast. 
The  difficulty  of  the  problem  lies  in  the  fact  that 
for  every  Booker  Washington  there  are  about 
500,000  debased  and  debasing  negroes. 

Roughly  speaking,  one-ninth  of  the  population  of 
the  United  States  is  made  up  of  negroes  of  various 
degrees  of  blackness.  In  a  large  number  of  the 
counties  and  congressional  districts  of  the  Southern 
States  they  constitute,  as  we  have  seen,  an  actual 
majority  of  the  population.  The  negro  vote,  if  the 
suffrage  were  granted  him  in  the  South,  and  if  his 
vote  were  cast  solidly  and  counted  honestly,  would 
elect  enough  United  States  senators,  in  all  proba 
bility,  to  become  a  balance  of  power  in  that  body. 
The  negro  would  also  elect  a  large  percentage  of  the 
Southern  members  of  the  House  of  Representatives. 
The  result  would  be  that  all  the  property  interests 
of  the  South  would  practically  be  disfranchised. 
Even  without  the  evils  of  "  carpet-bagism."  it  is 


The  Political  Issue  in 

easy  to  figure  out  that  within  a  few  years  after  the 
application  of  an  unqualified  manhood  suffrage  for 
the  negroes,  they  would  control  the  Southern  States, 
politically,  socially,  and  morally,  and  would  either 
destroy  the  cultured,  wealthy  white  class  or  drive  it 
northward. 

The  existence  of  such  busy  commercial  and  in 
dustrial  centres  as  Atlanta  and  Birmingham  is  abso 
lutely  dependent  upon  the  brains,  the  energy,  and  the 
capital  of  the  white  man.  Withdraw  these,  and  the 
cotton  mill,  the  blast  furnace,  and  even  the  fields 
of  cotton,  cane,  and  corn  would  have  to  be  aban 
doned.  The  negro  as  a  race  in  America  is  hundreds 
of  years  ahead  of  his  brother  in  Africa ;  but  though 
that  is  much  to  his  credit,  it  does  not  alter  the  fact 
that  he  is  thousands  of  years  behind  his  white 
neighbour. 

Look,  for  example,  at  the  case  of  Charleston,  the 
home  of  a  cultured  aristocracy;  the  home,  also,  of 
several  thousand  more  negroes  than  whites.  It  is 
readily  seen  why  the  white  people  of  Charleston  in 
sist  upon  keeping  a  tight  rein  upon  the  city  govern 
ment.  A  general  election  with  a  full  count  and  a 
free  ballot  would,  as  a  matter  of  course,  fill  every 
office  in  the  city  of  Charleston  with  a  negro,  and 
thus  would  be  reproduced  the  intolerable  condition 
of  the  reconstruction  period.  Two  alternatives  only 
were  open  to  the  white  population  of  such  a  city. 
They  must  either  themselves  seize  and  hold  the  gov- 


ii2         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

ernment,  at  all  hazards ;  or  they  must  leave  the  city, 
abandoning  it  to  negro  domination.  And  in  the 
latter  case,  white  capital  and  business  incentive  being 
removed,  the  negro  would  starve  to  death. 

This  is  the  problem  which  is  being  worked  out 
in  the  South;  and  while  it  is  undeniably  true 
that  the  negro  is  absolutely  deprived  of  the 
franchise,  it  is  also  true  that  the  white  man  treats 
him  with  great  fairness  and  forbearance,  and  that 
putting  aside  the  abstract  question  of  right  and 
wrong,  the  negro  is  far  better  off  in  Charleston  to 
day  than  he  was  when  he  had  the  ballot,  and  by  its 
exercise  precipitated  the  reign  of  terror  that  in 
those  days  prevailed. 

It  is  a  simple  thing  to  stand  in  a  Northern  pulpit 
or  to  sit  in  a  Northern  office  chair  and  from  that 
safe  vantage  ground  to  speak  or  write  about  equal 
rights,  the  genius  of  the  American  Constitution,  the 
beauty  of  a  free  ballot;  but  the  political  situation 
in  the  South  is  not  a  matter  of  theory,  but  of  fact. 
If  it  happens  to  come  in  conflict  with  our  American 
institutions,  so  much  the  worse  for  the  institutions. 
Looked  at  from  the  standpoint  of  theory,  the  ex 
isting  political  situation  in  all  the  Southern  States 
is  a  cruel  outrage,  a  manifest  violation  of  the  basic 
principles  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence; 
looked  at  in  the  light  of  social,  commercial,  and 
moral  conditions,  it  is  evident  that  to  disturb  pres 
ent  conditions  rashly,  in  obedience  to  the  voice  of 


The  Political  Issue  113 

uninformed  Northern  demagogues,  would  be  dis 
astrous,  first  to  the  white  man,  but  ultimately  and 
most  completely  to  the  black  man. 

To  travel  through  the  South  is  to  become  con 
stantly  more  and  more  impressed  with  the  fact  that 
the  best  interests  of  the  negro  are  not  in  any  way 
identified  with  politics.  Whether  he  has  or  has 
not  the  ballot  is  a  matter  which  may  well  be  left 
for  settlement  until  his  material  and  intellectual  con 
dition  has  been  vastly  improved.  For  what  the  ne 
gro  most  needs  to-day  is  education  of  head  and 
hand,  an  education  whose  sole  object  shall  be  to 
help  him  earn  his  daily  bread,  to  teach  him  to  dis 
pose  intelligently  of  the  fruits  of  his  labour.  Give 
the  ballot  to-day  to  the  tens  of  thousands  of  ig 
norant  negroes  in  the  cane  fields  of  Louisiana,  and 
they  will  be  much  worse  off  in  a  year's  time  than 
they  now  are.  The  ballot  would  not  procure  them 
another  day's  work,  nor  would  it  better  their  social 
condition,  because  they  could  not  apply  the  right  of 
suffrage  intelligently.  That  is  to  say,  the  negro 
as  a  whole,  no  matter  how  he  may  be  mistreated 
and  imposed  upon  by  the  white  people,  cannot  better 
his  condition  by  going  into  the  voting  booth,  be 
cause  he  cannot  apply  the  remedy  of  the  ballot 
in  such  a  way  as  to  create  a  change  for  the 
better. 

I  have  listened  to  some  terrible  stories  of  the 
reconstruction  period.  I  have  talked  to  some  sue- 


ii4         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

cessful  Northern  men,  now  living  in  the  South,  who 
have  themselves  told  me  that  no  one  can  compre 
hend  the  horrors  of  that  period,  except  those  who 
have  lived  through  it.  Most  of  the  evils  of  the 
carpet-bag  era  grew  out  of  the  dense  ignorance  of 
the  negroes  themselves.  I  have  seen  orders  of 
court  to  which  was  attached  a  cross,  witnessing  the 
signature  of  a  negro  circuit  judge  who  could  neither 
read  nor  write,  and  who  nevertheless  held  in  his 
hands  by  law  the  power  of  life  and  death  and  of 
the  distribution  of  property. 

It  will  be  many  a  year  before  the  Southern  negro 
can  be  educated  up  to  a  point  where  he  can  be 
trusted  to  discriminate  between  right  and  wrong, 
between  good  men  and  bad  men,  so  far  as  the  suf 
frage  is  concerned.  Just  at  the  present  time,  the 
great  masses  of  the  negroes  are  densely  ignorant; 
but  they  have  their  race  prejudice,  just  as  much  as 
the  white  man,  and  when  they  have  the  ballot  their 
votes  will  go  to  the  negro  candidate,  never  to  the 
white  man.  The  minute  that  the  negro  is  given  the 
ballot,  whether  he  acts  collectively  or  not,  he  has 
become  an  object  of  interest  to  the  practical  white 
politician;  and  no  one  who  pretends  to  understand 
the  negroes  can  escape  the  conviction  that  even  if 
they  were  restricted  to  a  ballot  for  white  candi 
dates,  their  votes  would  surely  be  given  to  the  high 
est  bidder.  The  negro  in  the  South  will  not  be 
fitted  to  exercise  the  right  of  suffrage  until  the  per- 


The  Political  Issue  115 

centage  of  illiteracy  is  enormously  decreased,  and 
this  will  take  not  decades,  but  generations. 

While  it  is  true  that  the  Southern  negro  as  a 
whole  is  not  fitted  to  exercise  the  right  of  suffrage, 
it  is  equally  true  that  the  Southern  white  man  has 
endeavoured  to  eliminate  him  by  means  of  methods 
so  unequal  in  their  operation,  so  manifestly  unfair, 
as  to  cause  resentment  on  the  part  of  the  negro, 
leading  the  black  man  to  believe  that  the  laws  made 
by  the  white  man  are  no  better  than  those  he  him 
self  would  enact.  Most  Southern  public  men  freely 
admit  this  fact,  but  they  point  out  that  they  are 
endeavouring  to  correct  by  means  of  local  statutes 
the  original  monumental  blunder  which  was  com 
mitted  when  the  negro,  fresh  from  the  debasing  in 
fluences  of  slavery,  was  given  the  ballot.* 

The  weakness  of  the  political  situation  in  the 
South  is  the  fact  that  the  white  leaders  have  been 
afraid  to  take  hold  of  the  problem  honestly,  that  is 
to  say,  they  have  either  been  afraid  or  unable  to 
enact  laws  which  would  apply  equally  to  white  and 

*  Amendments  to  Constitution,   1865-1870: 

ARTICLE  XIII.  Section  I. — Neither  slavery  nor  involuntary 
servitude,  except  as  a  punishment  for  crime  whereof  the 
party  shall  have  been  duly  convicted,  shall  exist  within  the 
United  States,  or  any  place  subject  to  their  jurisdiction. 

ARTICLE  XIV.  Section  I. — All  persons  born  or  naturalized 
in  the  United  States  and  subject  to  the  jurisdiction  thereof, 
are  citizens  of  the  United  States  and  of  the  State  wherein 
they  reside.  No  State  shall  make  or  enforce  any  law  which 


u6         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

black  men.  The  safety  of  the  South  undoubtedly 
lies  in  a  system  of  suffrage  based  upon  the  posses 
sion  of  property,  or  upon  an  educational  qualifica 
tion,  or  upon  both.  Nevertheless,  one  Southern 
legislature  after  another  has  passed  laws  which 
seemed  to  discriminate  between  white  and  black, 
and  which,  although  they  may  be  pronounced  con 
stitutional,  are  repugnant  to  the  ordinary  Anglo- 
Saxon  sense  of  justice. 

In  Georgia  there  are  no  limitations  on  the  suf 
frage  either  for  black  or  for  white  men,  so  far  as 
the  statute  books  show.  The  negro  can  vote  if  he 
wants  to,  but  he  has  stopped  wanting  to  in  Georgia, 
for  two  distinct  reasons.  In  the  first  place  the  white 
men  are  united  solidly,  and  there  is  practically  only 
one  party  in  the  State,  so  that  the  negro  finds  it 
useless  to  cast  his  vote.  Secondly,  he  discovers  that 
the  negro  who  mixes  in  politics  frequently  finds  it 
difficult  to  secure  work,  and  while  not  in  fear  of 
bodily  violence,  he  knows  that  on  the  whole  his  life 
will  be  longer  and  freer  from  care  if  he  refrains 

shall  abridge  the  privileges  or  immunities  of  citizens  of  the 
United  States ;  nor  shall  any  State  deprive  any  person  of 
life,  liberty,  or  property,  without  due  process  of  law;  nor 
deny  to  any  person  within  its  jurisdiction  the  equal  protection 
of  the  laws. 

ARTICLE  XV.  Section  i. — The  right  of  citizens  of  the 
United  States  to  vote  shall  not  be  denied  or  abridged  by  the 
United  States  or  by  any  State  on  account  of  race,  colour,  or 
previous  condition  of  servitude. 


The  Political  Issue  117 

from  the  ballot-box  habit  entirely.  In  the  other 
Southern  States  resort  has  been  had  to  various  de 
vices,  too  numerous  and  complicated  to  describe 
here,  but  all  based  upon  the  same  unfair  and  un 
equal  principle  of  writing  a  law  which  on  its  face 
is  applicable  to  all  men  alike,  but  which  in  fact 
allows  the  white  man  to  vote,  without  regard  to  his 
disqualifications,  but  prevents  the  black  man  from 
voting,  no  matter  how  well  fitted  he  may  be  to 
exercise  the  right  of  suffrage.  For  example,  in 
Virginia  the  negro  applicants  for  the  privilege  of 
voting  have  been  required  to  write  out  and  define 
such  expressions  from  the  constitution  as  "  writ  of 
supersedeas,"  "  ex  post  facto,"  and  "  bill  of  at 
tainder."  It  is  safe  to  say  that  few  white  men 
except  lawyers,  even  in  the  educated  North,  could 
give  offhand  a  satisfactory  definition  of  these  three 
terms.  This  "  understanding  "  clause  *  is  the  fa 
vourite  device  throughout  the  South.  On  its  face  it 
seems  fair  enough  to  require  that  an  intending  voter 
shall  not  only  be  able  to  read  and  write,  but  shall 
show  his  mental  capacity  by  demonstrating  that  he 
understands  what  he  reads  or  writes,  thus  proving 

*  ARTICLE  II.  Section  19.— Fourth:  A  person  able  to  read 
any  section  of  this  Constitution  submitted  to  him  by  the 
officers  of  the  registration  and  to  give  a  reasonable  explana 
tion  of  the  same;  or,  if  unable  to  read  such  section,  able  to 
understand  and  give  a  reasonable  explanation  thereof  when 
read  to  him  by  the  officers.  (Virginia  Constitution,  1902 — 
Elective  Franchise.) 


n8         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

that  he  is  capable  of  applying  the  ballot  in  a  proper 
manner.  That  is  the  theory  of  the  situation;  but 
of  course  every  one  knows  that  all  the  election 
clerks  are  white  men,  who  see  to  it  that  no  negroes 
are  allowed  to  vote  where  there  is  the  slightest 
danger  of  their  controlling  the  local  political 
situation.  The  whole  power  rests  in  the  hands 
of  these  election  officers.  They  can  readily 
be  satisfied  that  the  white  man  understands  a 
specified  section  of  the  constitution,  but  they 
can  never  be  brought  to  admit  that  the  would- 
be  black  voter  comprehends  what  he  reads  or 
writes. 

I  saw  hanging  on  the  library  wall  in  Booker 
Washington's  home  in  Tuskegee  his  life  certificate, 
which  showed  that  he  had  passed  the  necessary 
examination  and  could  always  be  permitted  to  vote, 
so  far  as  educational  qualifications  are  concerned, 
in  the  State  of  Alabama.  On  the  other  hand,  I 
talked  with  an  intelligent  young  coloured  man  in 
Virginia  who  could  read  and  write,  who  was  an 
accomplished  bookkeeper,  stenographer,  typewriter, 
and  journalist,  and  who  had  been  refused  the  right 
of  suffrage  because  he  could  not  offhand  give  a 
satisfactory  definition  of  a  "  writ  of  supersedeas." 
I  saw  at  the  same  time  one  of  the  election  judges 
who  refused  this  man  the  right  of  suffrage.  He 
was  an  ignorant,  fat,  half -drunken  saloon  keeper, 
manifestly  without  the  slightest  particle  of  educa- 


The  Political  Issue  119 

tion  or  social  standing,  and  infinitely  the  in 
ferior,  physically,  mentally,  and  morally,  of  the 
coloured  man  he  turned  away  from  the  election 
booth. 

The  "  grandfather "  clause  *  in  many  of  the 
States  was  merely  a  temporary  expedient.  It  con 
sisted  in  permitting  any  man  to  vote,  who  could 
show  that  his  grandfather  or  father  exercised  the 
right  of  suffrage  prior  to  or  about  the  time  of  the 
Civil  War.  Such  a  legal  device  would  be  absurd 
in  the  North,  where  the  communities  rapidly 
change;  but  there  are  few  or  no  immigrants  in  the 
Southern  States,  and  families  remain  about  the 

*  The  equivalent  of  the  following  is  adopted  in  the  Con 
stitutions  of  various  Southern  States,  with  relation  to  the 
provisions  as  to  the  elective  franchise : 

North  Carolina. — "  Every  person  presenting  himself  for 
registration  shall  be  able  to  read  and  write  any  section  of 
the  Constitution  in  the  English  language;  and  before  he  shall 
be  entitled  to  vote  he  shall  have  paid  on  or  before  the  first 
day  of  May,  of  the  year  in  which  he  proposes  to  vote,  his 
poll-tax  for  the  previous  year,  as  prescribed  by  Article  5, 
Section  i,  of  the  Constitution.  But  no  male  person,  who  was, 
on  January  i,  1867,  or  at  any  time  prior  thereto,  entitled  to 
vote  under  the  laws  of  any  State  of  the  United  States  wherein 
he  then  resided,  and  no  lineal  descendant  of  any  such  person, 
shall  be  denied  the  right  to  register  and  vote  at  any  election 
in  this  State,  by  reason  of  his  failure  to  possess  the  educa 
tional  qualifications  herein  prescribed.  ..."  (Revisal  of 
1905,  North  Carolina,  Vol.  2,  Art.  6,  Sec.  4,  Constitution  of 
North  Carolina.) 

The  effect  of  this  is  to  make  the  registration  of  negro  voters 
so  difficult  as  to  amount  to  a  prohibition. 


I2O         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

same,  so  that  thousands  of  ignorant  white  men  who 
could  neither  read  nor  write  had  no  difficulty  in 
tracing  their  ancestors  to  recognized  citizens  of  the 
commonwealth,  who  had  exercised  the  right  of  suf 
frage  fifty  years  ago. 

This  of  course  enabled  the  ignorant  white  men  to 
vote,  while  it  disfranchised  practically  all  the  col 
oured  men,  as  there  were  only  a  few  free  negroes 
prior  to  the  war  who  had  any  rights  to  citizenship, 
and  the  difficulty  of  tracing  their  posterity  is  some 
thing  well  understood  by  Southern  students  of  the 
race  question. 

The  "  grandfather  "  clause  was  born  in  Louisi 
ana,  and  its  father  was  the  present  governor  of  the 
State.  The  scheme  has  been  copied  in  one  form 
or  another  by  almost  all  the  Southern  States,  but  it 
is  worthy  of  note  that  as  originally  devised  in 
Louisiana  it  was  applied  with  strict  impartiality. 
Governor  Sanders  himself  has  given  the  following 
brief  outline  of  the  suffrage  restrictions  in  his  State, 
at  the  time  when  the  "  grandfather  "  clause  was  in 
force — for  the  registration  of  voters  under  it  was 
concluded  in  1898. 

'  There  are  in  our  suffrage  law,"  explained  Mr. 
Sanders,  "  three  ways  of  securing  registration  as 
a  voter.  In  the  first  place,  it  was  provided  that  if 
prior  to  September,  1898,  a  man  could  prove  that 
either  his  father  or  his  grandfather  was  entitled  to 
vote  in  1868  under  the  old  constitution,  he  could  be 


The  Political  Issue  121 

at  once  registered.*  If  he  did  not  take  advantage 
of  the  grandfather  clause  before  that  time,  he  would 
have  to  submit  to  the  ordinary  educational  or  prop 
erty  qualifications.  The  lists  made  up  in  1898  have 
not  been  altered  since  then,  and  of  course  they  con 
cern  only  the  people  who  were  registered  at  that 
time. 

"  Secondly,  a  man  is  permitted  to  register  pro 
vided  he  can  fill  out  the  blank  spaces  in  an  ordinary 
declaration  which  is  printed  in  the  constitution.  No 
discretion  is  given  to  the  election  officers,  and  there 
is  no  trickery  at  all.  The  mere  filling  out  of  the 
certificate  which  declares  that  the  man  believes  him 
self  a  legal  voter,  that  he  was  born  at  such  and  such 
a  place,  at  such  and  such  a  time,  and  that  he  is 

*  Louisiana  Constitution,  1898: 

ARTICLE  197.  Section  5  (Suffrage  and  Elections). — No  male 
person  who  was  on  January  i,  1867,  or  at  any  date  prior 
thereto,  entitled  to  vote  under  the  Constitution,  or  statutes 
of  any  State  of  the  United  States,  wherein  he  then  resided, 
and  no  son  or  grandson  of  any  such  person  not  less  than 
twenty-one  years  of  age  at  the  date  of  the  adoption  of  this 
Constitution,  and  no  male  person  of  foreign  birth,  who  was 
naturalized  prior  to  the  first  day  of  January,  1898,  shall  be 
denied  the  right  to  register  and  vote  in  this  State  by  reason 
of  his  failure  to  possess  educational  or  property  qualifications 
prescribed  by  this  Constitution,  provided,  he  shall  have  re 
sided  in  this  State  for  five  years  next  preceding  the  date  at 
which  he  shall  apply  for  registration,  and  shall  have  regis 
tered  in  accordance  with  the  terms  of  this  Article  prior  to 
September  i,  1898,  and  no  person  shall  be  entitled  to  register 
under  this  Section  after  said  date. 


122         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

therefore  so  many  years,  months,  and  days  old,  is 
complete  evidence  that  he  can  read,  write,  and  figure, 
and  that  he  therefore  has  satisfied  the  requirements 
of  the  law. 

"  I  myself  opposed  the  proposition  to  introduce 
any  trickery  by  requiring  the  applicant  for  regis 
tration  to  show  that  he  understands  the  law.  We 
require  an  ordinary  test  of  ability  to  read  and  write 
English,  and  nothing  but  that.  You  will  see,  then, 
that  under  the  Louisiana  law  a  man  may  become  a 
voter  in  any  one  of  three  different  ways.  If  his 
name  is  on  the  list  established  in  1898  he  can  vote 
now;  or  if  he  can  fill  out  the  required  certificate;  or 
if  he  can  show  that  he  pays  taxes  on  property  of 
an  assessed  value  of  $300. 

"  So  far  as  the  law  goes,  there  is  absolutely  no 
discrimination  against  the  negro.  There  were  free 
negroes  in  slavery  days  who  had  full  political  rights, 
and  their  descendants  could  have  been  put  on  the 
grandfather  list  in  1898.  It  so  happens  that  I  was 
put  on  that  list,  as  a  matter  of  precaution,  and  as  I 
can  read  and  write  and  pay  some  taxes  I  can  claim 
the  right  to  vote  under  either  one  of  these  three 
provisions  of  the  law.  Every  other  man,  black  or 
white,  has  the  same  right." 

Speaking  with  the  utmost  frankness  and  with  that 
honesty  of  purpose  and  directness  of  logic  which 
have  put  him  at  the  head  of  his  profession  in 
Louisiana,  Mr.  Sanders  continued : 


The  Political  Issue  123 

"  We  are  willing  to  give  to  the  negro  every  possi 
ble  right  except  social  and  political  equality.  That 
we  will  prevent  his  having.  We  will  prevent  it  as 
peaceably  as  we  can,  but  you  can  be  sure  that  we 
will  prevent  it.  The  Anglo-Saxon  never  brooks  op 
position  from  an  inferior  race,  and  white  men  will 
maintain  their  domination  in  Illinois  as  well  as  in 
Louisiana.  This  is  a  life-and-death  matter  with  us, 
and  every  man  who  has  actually  lived  among  ne 
groes  understands  this.  I  am  quite  well  aware  that 
this  policy  may  have  a  bad  effect  politically  outside 
the  black  belt,  but  it  will  be  maintained,  and  it  must 
be  maintained,  notwithstanding. 

"  Congress  may  cut  down  our  representation,  it 
may  deprive  us  of  both  senators;  but  none  the  less 
we  shall  have  to  keep  our  control  of  affairs  in  our 
own  community.  Few  of  our  negroes  have  voted 
since  1898.  In  the  sugar  parishes  they  are  all  la 
bourers  and  in  the  cotton  belt  they  are  generally 
tenants.  In  either  case,  the  white  man  owns  the 
land  and  the  negro  is  dependent  on  that  for  sup 
port,  so  that  when  he  finds  that  we  do  not  want 
him  to  vote,  and  insist  on  being  allowed  to  run 
the  politics  of  the  community,  he  stays  away  from 
the  polls.  But  he  is  not  disfranchised  by  law  in 
Louisiana,  and  that  fact  should  be  known  to  all 
people." 

Reduced  to  the  last  analysis,  all  the  laws  that 
can  be  devised  are  futile  finally  to  prevent  the  negro 


124         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

from  exercising  the  right  of  suffrage.  He  is  be 
coming  educated,  is  acquiring  property,  and  cannot 
be  barred  from  the  ballot  by  operation  of  law.  But 
outside  the  law,  the  white  man,  after  all,  controls 
the  situation.  He  is  the  employer  of  labour;  com 
mercially  as  well  as  industrially  he  is  master  of  the 
situation.  The  "  grandfather  "  clause,  the  "  under 
standing  "  clause,  and  similar  devices  of  politicians 
could  readily  be  upset  in  the  courts.  But  the  white 
men  are  always  able  to  insist  that  they  will  employ 
no  negroes  who  go  near  the  ballot  box ;  that  no  black 
voters  shall  be  accepted  as  tenants;  and  that  col 
oured  politicians  shall  not  be  sold  the  actual  neces 
sities  of  life. 

In  this  way  the  white  men  have  been  enabled 
absolutely  to  destroy  the  coloured  vote  in  the  South ; 
and  the  prospect  seems  to  be  that  they  will  maintain 
the  dominance  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  over  the  negro 
until  the  black  man  is  so  far  raised  in  the  social 
scale  that  he  can  be  trusted,  and  that  he  shall  cease 
to  be  a  positive  menace  to  the  welfare  of  the  com 
munity. 


IV 
Varying  Views  on  the  Suffrage  Question 

TWO  of  the  foremost  negro  educators  of  the 
South,  Booker  T.  Washington  and  Pro 
fessor  DuBois  of  Atlanta,  represent  radi 
cally  differing  points  of  view  among  the  negroes 
themselves  as  regards  their  political  status.  The 
latter  believes  that  the  suffrage  is  necessary  to  the 
salvation  of  his  people.  In  discussing  the  future 
of  the  negro  and  his  manifest  adaptability  to  the 
work  of  an  artisan,  Professor  DuBois  threw  a  curi 
ous  light  upon  the  influence  of  politics  in  the  matter 
of  industrial  development  and  the  earning  of  one's 
daily  bread. 

"  Our  negroes,"  he  said,  "  have  gone  into  almost 
every  conceivable  branch  of  trade  here  in  Atlanta; 
they  have  quite  generally  joined  the  trade  unions, 
but  wherever  there  is  a  lack  of  work  this  is  a  dis 
tinct  disadvantage  to  them.  That  is  to  say,  when 
he  does  not  belong  to  a  trade  union,  the  negro  can 
frequently  secure  work  which  he  needs  by  charging 
less  for  his  labour  than  the  white  man.  The  white 
employer  of  labour  will  choose  the  cheaper  labour, 
whether  it  be  white  or  black.  When  the  negro,  how- 

"5 


126         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

ever,  is  bound  by  union  rules,  and  cannot  cut  under 
the  card  rates,  he  is  immediately  put  at  a  disad 
vantage  as  compared  with  the  white  member  of  the 
same  union.  The  employer  will,  if  there  is  any 
discretion,  give  the  job  to  the  white  labourer,  be 
cause  he  has  a  vote,  has  a  voice  in  the  community, 
and  is  a  factor  to  be  reckoned  with;  whereas  the 
coloured  man,  although  a  member  of  the  same 
union,  has  neither  social  nor  political  influence. 
Thus  it  happens  that  \vhen  there  is  a  lack  of  work 
it  is  the  negro  who  is  first  out  of  a  job,  and  who 
is  not  protected  by  his  membership  in  the  union, 
merely  because  of  his  lack  of  political  influence  in 
the  community." 

Mr.  Washington,  on  the  other  hand,  claims  that 
it  is  not  true  that  his  people  are  either  interested 
in  politics  or  seeking  office.  When  asked  if  he 
thought  the  time  had  come  for  the  negro  to  insist 
on  his  right  of  suffrage  in  the  South,  he  replied 
cautiously : 

"  It  is  well  known  that  I  take  the  position  that  no 
race  in  the  economic  and  educational  condition  of 
the  masses  of  the  black  people  at  the  present  time 
should  make  the  matter  of  politics  a  question  of 
first  importance  in  connection  with  their  develop 
ment.  There  are  other  considerations  which  must 
precede  and  underlie  political  prominence.  I  make 
this  statement  not  in  speaking  of  the  negro  only, 
but  as  applicable  to  any  people  in  the  same  stage  of 


Views  on  the  Suffrage  Question     127 

development.  I  do  believe,  however,  as  I  have  often 
stated  before  in  the  South  as  in  the  North,  that  the 
negro  should  have  constantly  held  out  before  him 
a  hope  of  reward  for  right  living;  and  the  law 
that  rewards  righteous  living  should  be  the  same 
for  both  races." 

This  latter  sentence,  of  course,  refers  to  the  cry 
ing  disgrace  of  the  South,  the  one  thing  which  must 
ultimately  break  down  the  present  suffrage  system 
by  the  force  of  honest  public  opinion,  which  is,  that 
the  educational  tests  generally  adopted  in  the  South 
apply  to  the  negro  only,  while  the  ignorant  and 
illiterate  white  man  is  everywhere  permitted  to 
vote. 

The  ideas  of  Booker  Washington  are  heartily 
endorsed  in  the  South,  according  to  Clark  Howell, 
editor  of  the  Atlanta  Constitution.  "  The  people 
of  the  South  generally,"  he  declares,  "  are  in  hearty 
accord  with  Booker  Washington,  and  his  effort  for 
the  settlement  of  the  negro  question.  They  believe 
he  has  struck  the  keynote,  and  the  Southern  people 
will  give  him  a  hearty  support  in  his  efforts  to  keep 
the  negroes  out  of  politics  and  build  up  the  indus 
trial  education  of  his  race. 

"  Booker  Washington's  lesson  is  what  the  people 
of  the  North  need  most  to  learn.  Not  only  here 
but  there,  the  negro  who  has  mixed  in  politics  in 
any  way  will  insist  that  the  salvation  of  the  race 
can  be  achieved  only  through  the  ballot  box.  These 


128         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

men,  and  there  are  some  of  them  right  here  in 
Atlanta,  are  antagonizing  Booker  Washington  in 
stead  of  supporting  him,  and  it  is  this  antagonism 
which  is  encouraged,  in  fact  endorsed,  by  the  ap 
pointment  of  negroes  to  important  political  posi 
tions  in  the  Southern  States." 

Mr.  Howell  is  enthusiastic  in  regard  to  the  possi 
bility  of  a  settlement  of  the  negro  question,  if  the 
people  of  the  North,  who  are  not  immediately  con 
cerned,  will  only  trust  the  people  of  the  South  to 
settle  the  matter  in  the  only  way  in  which  it  can 
possibly  be  adjusted.  Indeed,  he  even  says  "  there 
is  no  race  question." 

"  Just  let  us  alone,"  he  said,  "  that  is  the  whole 
story.  Let  us  alone  to  settle  this  matter  ourselves, 
without  interference,  and  the  best  interests  of  blacks 
and  whites  will  be  taken  care  of.  By  letting  us 
alone,  I  mean,  for  instance,  that  there  should  be  no 
appointment  of  negroes  to  important  federal  posi 
tions  in  high  communities.  There  is  no  possible 
objection  to  the  coloured  man's  going  into  subordi 
nate  positions  in  the  civil  service,  like  that  of  a  let 
ter-carrier.  He  is  fitted  for  that  kind  of  work,  but 
he  is  not  fitted  for  the  important  places  to  which 
he  is  appointed  by  the  Republican  presidents.  Re 
move  the  fear  of  negro  domination  and  the  South 
ern  States  will  at  once  split  up  on  ordinary  economic 
lines.  Several  of  them  will  surely  go  Republican. 
When  the  people  of  the  North  understand  this  sit- 


Views  on  the  Suffrage  Question     129 

uation,  the  so-called  negro  question  will  be  disposed 
of,  and  not  before. 

"  The  people  of  Georgia  have  at  no  time  been 
afraid  of  an  intelligent  negro  vote.  It  is  the  rule  of 
the  vicious  and  ignorant  we  fear.  The  best  thought 
of  the  South,  the  men  who  are  in  the  forefront  of 
its  modern  progress,  know  it  is  not  best  to  have 
only  one  party.  Feeling,  however,  that  the  negro 
question  is  the  paramount  issue,  we  settle  all  of  our 
political  fights  in  the  white  primary,  so  that  the 
actual  vote  cast  at  an  election  is  but  a  fraction  of 
that  put  into  the  ballot  of  the  primary.  The  result 
is  that  the  white  voters  of  Georgia  form  a  single 
political  party.  The  negroes  know  this,  and  thus 
they  make  no  attempt  to  vote.  We  have  not  found 
it  necessary  to  resort  to  extraordinary  educational 
qualifications." 

Mr.  Howell's  summing  up  of  his  opinions  on  the 
subject  was  at  once  significant  and  sensible.  "If 
the  people  of  the  North,"  he  said,  "  devoted  them 
selves  as  anxiously  to  getting  work  for  the  negro 
as  they  do  to  getting  him  the  ballot,  they  would 
solve  the  negro  question  at  once." 


THE  SOLUTION 


What  the  Negro  Has  Done  for  the  Negro 

ONE  of  the  most  advanced  negro  philan 
thropists  in  the  country  is  Professor  W. 
H.  H.  Hart.  Born  a  slave  in  a  stockade 
in  Alabama,  he  had  his  first  schooling  from  a  Yan 
kee  "  school-marm  "  under  the  shade  of  a  forest  on 
the  banks  of  the  Chattahoochee.  By  the  road  of 
the  study  of  law  he  has  progressed  to  membership 
of  the  bar  in  every  court  in  the  District  of  Colum 
bia,  and  to  the  professorship  of  law  in  Howard 
University,  of  which  he  is  a  graduate.  He  has  been 
assistant  to  the  district  attorney  in  his  city,  and  as 
sistant  librarian  of  Congress.  But  besides  all  these 
achievements,  he  is  head  of  a  voluntary  charitable 
institution  of  his  own,  known  as  the  Hart  Farm 
School,  which  since  1897  he  has  supported  out  of  his 
own  pocket. 

Professor  Hart  knows  the  South  as  well,  perhaps, 
as  any  man  in  the  country,  so  far  as  racial  charac 
teristics  are  concerned;  and  as  his  own  father  and 
both  his  grandfathers  were  white  men,  he  is  per 
haps  as  well  equipped  by  training  as  any  one  can 

133 


134         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

be  to  understand  the  tremendous  issues  involved 
in  what  is  known  as  the  negro  question  in  the 
United  States. 

"  No  nostrums.  No  miracles."  This  is  the  text 
from  which  Professor  Hart  preaches  a  remarkable 
sermon.  It  must  be  understood,  in  the  first  place, 
that  he  is  broad  enough  and  fair  enough  to  talk 
conservatively,  patiently,  hopefully,  and  philosoph 
ically  regarding  a  great  question  which  he  himself 
says  will  require  generations  to  settle.  He  takes  the 
ground,  fortifying  his  position  with  an  astonishing 
grasp  of  the  actual  situation  in  the  United  States, 
that  the  negro  is  nothing  more  nor  less  than  a  man, 
not  peculiar  in  any  sense,  but  to  be  dealt  with  as 
other  men  would  be  dealt  with,  when  placed  in 
exactly  the  same  circumstances. 

Granting  at  once  that  ignorance  is  the  great  bar 
to  progress,  Professor  Hart  insists  that  education 
through  the  medium  of  the  common  school  is  the 
only  solution  of  the  race  problem  in  America.  Fur 
thermore,  he  insists  that  the  South  is  not  entirely 
to  blame  for  the  illiteracy  of  the  blacks,  and  that 
it  is  the  duty  of  the  nation  at  large  to  provide  a  na 
tional  school  fund  adequate  to  eliminate  the  ignorant 
negro  from  the  problem  altogether.  The  South,  he 
says,  is  too  poor  to  do  this  work  itself ;  and  as  the 
illiterate  negroes,  ignorant  from  no  fault  of  their 
own,  are  none  the  less  a  menace  to  the  safety  of 
the  whole  republic,  it  therefore  becomes  the  duty  of 


The  Negro  for  the  Negro          135 

the  nation  at  large,  by  the  use  of  the  national  funds, 
to  stamp  out  illiteracy  in  the  South  just  as  it  would 
stamp  out  an  epidemic  of  yellow  fever  in  human 
beings,  or  of  the  "  foot  and  mouth  disease  "  in  cat 
tle. 

This  remarkable  man  is  a  quadroon ;  in  his  veins 
there  runs  but  one-fourth  part  of  negro  blood.  All 
the  rest  is  white;  but  under  the  old  and  the  present 
laws  he  is  none  the  less  a  negro.  If  he  were  not 
so  by  law  he  would  be  by  inclination,  for  he  has 
devoted  his  life  to  an  entirely  practical  and  suc 
cessful  effort  to  better  certain  portions  of  his  own 
race,  dividing  his  time  and  energy  between  his  in 
struction  at  Howard  University,  where  coloured 
men  and  women  are  given  a  remarkably  good  higher 
education,  and  his  personal  charitable  work.  The 
Farm  School  began  upon  a  farm  which  its  founder 
owned  a  few  miles  down  the  Potomac  from  Wash 
ington,  where  years  ago  Professor  Hart  set  out  to 
create  a  home  for  the  little  coloured  waifs  of  the 
capital.  About  1900  Congress  recognized  it  as  a 
successful  charity,  and  passed  a  small  appropriation 
in  its  aid.  But  until  that  time  and  since  then,  every 
cent  accruing  from  a  successful  law  practice  was 
devoted  to  the  work,  which  is  in  the  nature  of  a 
voluntary  reform  school.  The  little  street  crim 
inals  were  actually  put  on  their  honour,  and  with 
entire  success.  No  bolts,  no  bars,  no  guards,  no 
high  walls  labelled  this  novel  institution  as  a  re- 


136         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

formatory.  Each  little  coloured  chap  was  told  that 
his  own  interest  was  involved  in  remaining  at  the 
school ;  and  to  the  everlasting  credit  of  the  "  little 
cusses  "  be  it  said  that  few  of  them  ever  have  run 
away,  and  most  of  those  who  have,  came  back  of 
their  own  accord. 

This  single  paragraph  can  in  no  way  be  a  fair 
treatment  of  so  extensive  a  work  as  that  of  Pro 
fessor  Hart.  But  the  reference  to  that  work  shows 
the  kind  of  man  he  is,  and  accentuates  the  value  of 
his  observations  upon  the  race  question.  He  has 
studied  the  possibilities,  the  racial  tendencies,  and 
especially  the  criminology  of  the  negro  in  a  place 
where  he  comes  in  the  most  favourable  circum 
stances  into  contact  with  the  whites.  And  he  has 
spent  all  his  own  money  on  the  work  of  uplifting 
the  class  of  negroes  from  which  criminals  are  made, 
never  soliciting  a  dollar  from  outside  sources.  The 
money  voted  by  Congress  is  sufficient  only  for  a 
small  part  of  the  running  expenses,  and  all  the  land, 
all  the  buildings,  the  cost  of  supervision,  and  the 
building  tip  of  permanent  improvements,  have  been 
contributed  alone  and  unaided  by  this  devoted  ne 
gro  philanthropist.  His  work  gives  a  suggestion 
of  the  way  in  which  the  negro  problem  is  to  be 
solved;  apparently  the  responsibility  of  the  individ 
ual  plays  a  large  part  in  Professor  Hart's  idea  of 
the  solution. 

Atlanta,  that  splendid  new  metropolis  of  the  new 


The  Negro  for  the  Negro          137 

South,  is  the  seat  of  a  number  of  the  most  impor 
tant  educational  institutions  for  the  coloured  peo 
ple.  From  the  time  of  Sherman's  famous  capture 
of  this  city,  Northern  philanthropists  began  the 
work  of  education  from  this  centre.  The  negro 
forms  only  one-third  of  the  population,  and  is  not 
much  in  evidence  on  the  streets;  but  he  fills  fully 
one-half  of  the  places  in  the  industrial  world,  and 
so  is  closely  associated  with  the  city  and  feels  a 
pride  in  it.  Quite  the  most  interesting  feature  of 
the  negro  life  here  is  Atlanta  University,  and  one 
of  the  most  cultivated  of  negro  men  is  Professor 
W.  E.  Burghardt  DuBois  of  the  chair  of  economics 
and  history  in  that  institution. 

To  reach  the  room  of  Dr.  DuBois,  one  trudges 
up  two  flights  of  stairs,  through  bare,  uncarpeted 
college  halls,  and  at  the  top  finds  himself  suddenly 
transported  into  the  busy  literary  workshop  of  a 
close  student.  Seated  at  the  centre  of  a  big  table, 
revolving  easily  in  his  office  chair,  alert,  intelligent, 
conservative,  weighing  his  words  cautiously,  and 
yet  speaking  with  the  confidence  born  of  profound 
study,  the  picture  of  this  brown-skinned,  well- 
dressed,  self-poised  scholar  was  one  not  soon  to  be 
forgotten.  Eliminate  the  question  of  colour,  which 
of  course  is  a  mere  matter  of  taste,  and  the  picture 
would  be  that  of  an  exceedingly  attractive  man. 
He  has  accomplished  a  European  cut  to  his  short 
whisker  which  tells  of  training  abroad;  and  while 


138         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

he  possesses  all  the  easy  bearing  of  the  cultured 
gentleman,  there  is  not  the  slightest  trace  of  the 
forwardness  and  presumption  which  Southern  white 
men  invariably  ascribe  to  the  negro  of  mixed  blood, 
no  matter  what  his  position. 

Dr.  DuBois  is  an  excellent  specimen  in  proof  of 
the  possibilities  of  the  New  England  training.  In 
his  person  he  gives  the  lie  to  the  frequently  circu 
lated  statements  that  the  negro  is  not  susceptible  of 
real  culture.  Born  in  the  Massachusetts  town  of 
Great  Barrington,  in  the  heart  of  the  Berkshires, 
he  had  excellent  opportunity  to  show  what  can  be 
clone  for  the  negro  in  the  way  of  education  when 
he  is  thrown  among  the  right  surroundings.  He 
played  with  the  little  Yankee  boys,  unconsciously 
assimilated  to  himself  their  condition  of  culture,  re 
ceived  an  excellent  education,  went  to  Harvard, 
studied  in  the  Fisk  University  at  Nashville,  and 
completed  his  education  abroad  among  the  scholars 
of  Germany,  where  he  was  treated  as  an  equal,  lived 
in  a  German  family,  and  had  all  the  advantages  of 
German  culture. 

With  such  a  training,  it  is  difficult  to  understand 
at  first  how  such  a  man  could  have  betaken  himself 
to  the  backwoods  and  taught  a  little  country  school 
for  coloured  children,  until  one  realizes  that  even  in 
the  North,  a  cultivated  negro  gentleman  can  be  com 
pletely  isolated  by  the  operation  of  the  rules  of 
caste.  He  could  turn  with  positive  enthusiasm  to 


The  Negro  for  the  Negro  139 

a  life  like  that  at  the  Atlanta  University,  where  the 
white  people  of  the  city  do  not  receive  him  in  any 
capacity,  but  where  he  finds  a  cultivated  set  of  peo 
ple,  who,  like  himself,  are  devoted  to  the  uplifting 
of  the  negro  and  to  the  solving  of  the  great 
race  question,  which  seems  now  to  be  the  most 
puzzling  and  the  most  profound  in  American 
social  life. 

Dr.  DuBois  is  not  only  interesting  as  an  object 
lesson  of  the  value  of  education  and  environment 
for  the  negro,  but  he  also  has  the  peculiar  racial 
characteristics.  He  is  a  mulatto  and  the  child  of 
mulattoes,  who  were  also  the  children  of  mulattoes, 
the  white  strain  being  three  and  four  generations 
back.  Mrs.  DuBois,  it  is  interesting  to  note,  is  the 
daughter  of  a  mulatto  and  a  white  German  woman. 
Who  could  be  better  qualified  to  speak  of  his  race, 
its  instincts,  its  possibilities,  and  its  aspirations, 
than  this  Northern-born,  Harvard-bred,  mixed- 
blooded  negro,  about  as  much  white  as  black,  who 
voluntarily  subjects  himself  to  complete  social  os 
tracism  in  the  South,  to  labour  for  the  future  ad 
vancement  of  his  own  people? 

"  Somehow  there  never  was  a  place  for  me,"  said 
Dr.  DuBois  in  discussing  his  early  life  in  the  North. 
"  During  my  earliest  boyhood  days,  I  knew  no  dif 
ference  between  me  and  the  other  boys  about  me. 
They  treated  me  as  an  equal,  and  I  did  not  realize  in 
any  way  what  it  meant  to  be  coloured.  My  first 


140         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

intimation  was  that  during  the  summer  vacations, 
as  I  grew  older,  the  other  boys  were  able  to  earn 
a  little  money  as  clerks  in  stores  or  in  similar  posi 
tions,  but  there  never  was  a  vacancy  for  me  in 
those  Yankee  stores.  People  were  glad  to  have 
me  mow  their  lawns,  water  their  grass,  and  do 
similar  odd  jobs,  but  I  never  could  get  the  same 
opportunity  the  white  boy  had,  even  though  this 
was  New  England.  I  remember  only  too  well  little 
uneducated,  almost  outcast  Irish  boys,  who  lived 
on  the  street  with  me  and  with  whom  I  would  not 
think  of  associating.  They  had  their  opportunities, 
however;  could  find  their  way  into  stores  where 
there  was  a  chance  to  rise ;  and  they  all  did  rise, 
in  business,  in  politics,  and  in  social  life,  while  I 
was  stranded  in  my  manhood  just  where  I  was  in 
my  boyhood. 

"  The  Northern  people  think  they  have  opened 
the  door  of  hope,  but  they  have  never  stopped  to 
think  that  it  does  not  lead  anywhere.  They  have 
given  the  negro  the  franchise  and  he  is  treated  as 
an  equal  before  the  law,  and  for  that  all  credit  is 
due  the  North.  But  the  negro  has  no  opportunity 
in  business;  he  cannot  secure  a  subordinate  place 
in  a  business  house  with  the  slightest  prospect  of 
promotion,  no  matter  how  faithful,  how  intelligent, 
how  determined  to  succeed  he  may  be.  There  is  a 
constant  lack  of  opportunity  for  the  coloured  youth, 
and  if  he  becomes  idle,  if  he  becomes  careless  and 


The  Negro  for  the  Negro          141 

indifferent  to  the  interests  of  his  employers,  it  is 
because  he  has  become  doomed  to  remain  in  a  sub 
ordinate  capacity,  and  he  knows  it.  Even  in  the 
liberty-loving  North  there  is  for  him  no  chance  of 
promotion,  no  incentive  for  good  work.  The  negro 
in  the  North  is  not  sufficiently  numerous  yet  to 
have  a  cultivated  society  of  his  own,  except  in  a 
few  large  centres.  He  is,  therefore,  isolated,  and 
while  the  Northern  people  believe  they  treat  him 
with  utmost  fairness,  the  messenger  boy  in  the 
store  never  becomes  a  salesman,  the  carpenter  never 
becomes  a  foreman,  and  the  hotel  bell-boy  is  never 
put  behind  the  desk." 

This  gentle  indictment  of  the  effect  of  caste  in 
that  North  which  is  seeking  impudently  to  settle 
the  negro  question  for  the  South  was  delivered 
without  the  slightest  trace  of  passion.  A  story 
which  Dr.  DuBois  told  me  of  his  experiences  in 
Germany  was  also  suggestive  of  his  attitude.  He 
and  a  young  German,  who  looked  like  a  Jew  but 
was  not,  were  calling  upon  some  German  girls.  The 
young  women  manifested  some  signs  of  displeasure, 
which  young  DuBois  thought  was  directed  at  him. 
His  companion  instantly  explained,  however. 
'  They  think  I  am  a  Jew,  and  therefore  they  resent 
associating  with  me.  You  are  not  concerned.  This 
is  a  race  question,  and  you  do  not  understand  such 
prejudices." 

"As  if  I  didn't  understand  race  prejudices  only 


142         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

too  well,  and  a  thousand  times  better  than  he  did," 
commented  the  narrator. 

In  explaining  his  work  at  Atlanta,  he  continued : 
"  Teachers  are  absolutely  necessary  to  the  education 
of  the  negro  masses.  Hence  schools  and  colleges 
for  the  higher  education  of  the  negro  must  be  sup 
ported  and  maintained  in  the  South  before  you  can 
possibly  hope  to  wipe  out  illiteracy  among  the 
masses.  About  one  million  out  of  three  millions 
of  negro  children  are  actually  going  to  school.  The 
need  for  teachers  is  so  great  that  the  field  cannot  be 
filled  for  many  years  to  come,  no  matter  how  hard 
we  work.  Thus  it  is  true  that  institutions  for  the 
higher  education  of  the  negro  have  an  abundant 
field,  if  it  were  nothing  more  than  to  supply  teach 
ers,  because  it  is  quite  manifest  that  you  cannot 
secure  teachers  for  common  schools  except  by  giv 
ing  them  a  higher  education  than  the  common 
schools  afford.  Such  statistics  as  we  have  been  en 
abled  to  get  show  that  about  fifty  per  cent  of  the 
graduates  of  negro  colleges  become  teachers,  and 
it  goes  without  saying  that  they  are  teachers  of 
their  own  race. 

"  In  one  of  the  recent  social  studies  conducted  by 
the  university,  it  was  figured  out  that  of  the  negro 
college  graduates  over  half  are  teachers,  one-sixth 
are  preachers,  another  sixth  are  students  and  pro 
fessional  men,  over  six  per  cent  are  farmers, 
artisans,  and  merchants,  and  four  per  cent  are  in 


The  Negro  for  the  Negro          143 

the  government  service.  Our  negro  physicians  are 
succeeding  much  better  from  a  financial  standpoint 
than  any  other  class  of  professional  men.  They  are 
practising,  of  course,  almost  exclusively  among  col 
oured  people,  but  in  Atlanta,  in  Washington,  in 
Philadelphia,  in  Chicago,  and  in  other  large  centres 
there  are  negro  physicians  who  are  making  fine  in 
comes,  and  you  must  remember  one  on  Pennsyl 
vania  Avenue  in  Washington  who  runs  his  own 
automobile  on  his  daily  rounds. 

"  Most  of  our  college  graduates  who  leave  us 
in  June  find  something  to  do  by  September.  It  is 
not  at  all  true,  as  they  say  here,  that  the  highly 
educated  negro  in  the  South  finds  no  field  of  occu 
pation  and  goes  North.  On  the  contrary,  he  is 
working  here  among  his  own  race,  and  is  almost 
invariably  successful." 

If  Dr.  DuBois  is  able  to  argue  convincingly  for 
the  higher  education  of  the  negro,  the  other  side 
is  not  unsupported,  even  by  the  negro  himself. 
Every  one  knows  Tuskegee.  Every  one  knows 
Booker  T.  Washington,  the  man  among  a  million 
who  has  conceived  and  executed  the  greatest  work 
now  being  done  for  his  race.  It  is  not  necessary 
to  go  into  detail  as  to  the  life  history  or  personal 
characteristics  of  the  great  leader.  The  most  strik 
ing  traits  in  his  personality  are  his  modest  self- 
confidence,  the  directness  and  intentness  of  his  in 
tellectual  methods,  and  the  extreme  simplicity  and 


144         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

honesty  of  his  daily  life.  He  could  not  be  less 
ostentatious  if  he  were  at  the  head  of  a  little  barber 
shop,  instead  of  being  the  principal  of  a  great  insti 
tution  with  a  cash  capital  of  over  a  million,  with 
tweny-five  hundred  acres  of  land,  with  seventeen 
hundred  students,  and  with  a  special  endowment 
providing  for  the  life-time  needs  of  the  principal 
himself. 

Talking  over  the  general  plans  of  this  institu 
tion,  which,  as  every  one  knows,  is  built  up  on  the 
theory  of  teaching  the  negro  how  to  use  his  hands 
intelligently  in  useful  trades,  in  agriculture,  and 
in  the  foundation  of  industrial  life,  I  called  atten 
tion  to  the  fact  that  it  was  being  asserted  that  the 
educated  negro  found  nothing  to  do  after  he  came 
out  of  school  and  college,  and  was  forced  either 
to  go  North  or  to  slip  back  into  the  social  condi 
tion  from  which  he  emerged  when  he  went  to 
school. 

"  It  is  not  at  all  true  within  our  experience,"  said 
the  principal,  leaning  back  in  his  office  chair,  with 
his  hands  in  the  pockets  of  a  commodious  seer 
sucker  coat,  "  that  the  educated  negro  fails  to  find 
work  in  the  South  and  is  driven  northward.  On 
the  contrary,  the  literary  colleges  find  it  difficult  to 
supply  the  demand  for  teachers;  and  I  am  quite 
positive,  so  far  as  our  own  students  go,  that  those 
who  are  trained  in  the  industrial  pursuits  can  find 
instant  employment.  In  fact,  the  great  difficulty 


The  Negro  for  the  Negro          145 

is  to  keep  them  here  during  an  entire  course,  be 
cause  they  find  opportunities  of  employment  at  com 
paratively  high  prices  long  before  they  are  ready  for 
graduation,  and  the  temptation  to  go  out  into  the 
world  for  themselves  is  frequently  more  than  they 
can  withstand.  The  development  of  the  South 
along  industrial  lines  has  become  so  great  that  the 
demand  for  artisans  in  all  classes  of  trades  is  far 
in  excess  of  the  supply. 

"  The  favourite  trades  of  the  students  here  seem 
to  be  bricklaying,  carpentering,  and  tailoring.  I 
presume  they  apply  for  instruction  in  these  trades 
because  the  demand  is  greatest  outside  in  those 
particular  lines.  There  is,  however,  practically  an 
equal  demand  for  millwrights,  plumbers,  wagon- 
makers,  and  gas-fitters;  and  we  have  a  great  many 
letters  asking  for  graduates  to  take  charge  of  dairy 
farms.  Our  needs  here  in  Tuskegee  have  led  us 
to  pay  more  than  ordinary  attention  to  the  building 
trades.  We  have  had  to  get  housed,  and  the  prob 
lem  has  been  by  no  means  a  small  one.  Counting 
students,  teachers,  and  children  in  the  families,  we 
have  to  provide  for  about  seventeen  hundred  people 
at  a  time,  and  this  has  kept  us  busy  with  new 
buildings,  all  of  which  have  been  put  up,  designed, 
decorated,  and  in  most  cases  furnished  complete  by 
our  own  negro  labour." 

Asked  if  he  saw  at  Tuskegee  any  indication  of 
the  truth  of  the  charge  so  frequently  made  by  the 


146         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

white  man,  that  the  negro  has  a  deficient  intellectual 
capacity  and  cannot  succeed  in  any  occupation 
which  requires  the  use  of  the  reasoning  faculties 
to  any  great  extent,  Dr.  Washington  replied  that 
he  had  never  yet  discovered  any  indication  of  any 
bar  to  the  intellectual  growth  of  the  negro.  "  His 
reasoning  power,"  he  said,  "  seems  to  be  as  well 
developed  as  any  other  mental  trait.  Allowing  for 
early  associations,  and  for  the  negro's  lack  of  home 
training,  his  logical  capacity  seems  to  be  about  the 
same  as  that  of  the  whites.  In  fact,  the  race  is 
developing  along  lines  which  have  necessitated  the 
use  of  its  reasoning  faculties  to  an  extraordinary 
degree,  and  under  conditions  in  which  there  could 
not  have  been  success  without  these  reasoning 
faculties. 

"  For  instance,  we  used  to  have  great  difficulty 
in  securing  negroes  to  handle  our  electric  plant,  and 
of  course  to  give  instructions  in  that  department  as 
well,  for  everything  here  must  be  viewed  from  the 
educational  standpoint.  We  also  found  it  hard  to 
discover  men  properly  trained  in  mechanical  and 
agricultural  drawing,  or  to  conduct  chemical  ex 
periments  for  the  agricultural  department,  or  who 
were  educated  in  general  scientific  work.  Now  all 
this  has  been  changed.  The  scientific  departments 
can  readily  be  equipped  with  negroes  who  have  a 
highly  technical  training.  This  indicates  pretty 
clearly  that  the  capacity  of  the  coloured  man  is 


The  Negro  for  the  Negro          147 

not  at  fault,  because  he  is  beginning  to  demonstrate 
his  ability  along  lines  which  absolutely  require  the 
accurate  use  of  the  reasoning  faculties. 

"  It  is  true,  however,  that  the  negro  is  lacking  in 
foresight.  He  does  not,  as  a  class,  look  ahead,  and 
he  is  frequently  quite  improvident  with  both  time 
and  money,  but  that  is  not  a  constitutional  fault. 

"  Our  own  students  here  are  being  trained  in 
scientific  agriculture,  and  we  are  seeking  to  teach 
them  the  reasons  for  things,  so  that  they  may  act 
intelligently.  The  graduates  of  our  agricultural  de 
partment  have  been  almost  uniformly  successful  as 
individual  farmers." 

Frequently  in  the  South  the  charge  is  made  that 
the  education  given  to  negro  women  at  Tuskegee 
unfits  them  for  domestic  service  instead  of  training 
them  for  it,  giving  them  exalted  ideas  and  ambi 
tions  which  render  them  unfitted  for  real  life,  and 
which  result  in  the  long  run  in  mental,  if  not  moral 
degradation.  I  asked,  accordingly,  whether  the 
school  was  essentially  designed  to  teach  the  women 
domestic  service,  and  so  arranged  as  not  to  give 
them  false  ideas. 

"  We  do  train  our  students  here,"  said  this  con 
servative  observer,  who  discussed  the  talents  and 
feelings  of  his  own  race  so  dispassionately,  "  in  the 
highest  grades  of  domestic  service.  No  girl  who 
graduates  here  at  Tuskegee  can  possibly  feel  above 
going  into  domestic  service,  because  we  especially 


148         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

and  above  all  teach  them  the  dignity  of  labour  in  all 
directions.  That  is  the  foundation  stone  of  this 
school.  It  is  quite  true,  nevertheless,  that  you  will 
not  find  many  of  our  women  graduates  actually  en 
gaged  in  household  work,  either  here  or  in  the 
North.  The  reason  for  this  is  that  the  girls  who 
graduate  here  have  received  a  training  which  en 
ables  them  to  command  wages  of  from  five  to  ten 
dollars  a  week  and  even  higher.  This  is  much  more 
than  they  can  hope  to  earn  in  any  ordinary  house 
hold  work,  at  least  here  in  the  South,  where  the 
average  rate  of  pay  for  this  kind  of  employment  is 
from  eight  to  ten  dollars  a  month." 


II 

The  Southerner's  Point  of  View 

A  interesting  statement  of  the  negro  problem 
and  its  outcome,  from  the  viewpoint  of  the 
average  Southerner  of  education,  is  outlined 
in  the  following  discussion  of  the  matter  by  one  of 
the  most  intellectual  and  broad-minded  men  in  the 
quaint  old  city  of  Savannah.  His  point  of  view  is 
not  as  cold-blooded  nor  as  relentless  as  it  seems,  for 
it  must  be  admitted  that  the  policy  of  white  domina 
tion  is  a  matter  of  actual  self-preservation  for  the 
Southern  States,  where  in  many  a  county  equal  po 
litical  rights  could  only  result  in  submerging  the  in 
telligent  portion  of  the  community  beneath  a 
strangling  wave  of  semi-barbarity.  There  was  a 
certain  placid  philosophy  in  this  man's  elabora 
tion  of  his  theory  of  the  relation  between  the 
races. 

"  This  is  a  white  man's  country,"  was  his  starting 
point.  "  The  white  men  earned  their  own  civiliza 
tion,  and  cut  their  own  way  to  the  place  they  now 
occupy.  They  do  not  propose  to  share  that  place 
with  a  race  of  men  which  is  at  best  centuries  behind 
the  white  people  in  development. 

149 


150         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

u  We  will  take  care  of  the  negro,  we  will  educate 
him,  we  will  look  after  him;  but  he  must  be  sub 
ordinated  for  all  time  to  come  to  the  stronger  race. 
He  may  be  a  political  equal  some  day,  but  he  cannot 
be  now.  We  will  not  receive  him  in  our  homes  on 
terms  of  equality;  we  will  not  associate  with  him 
in  business  enterprises;  and  we  will  not  give  him 
political  equality  if  we  can  help  it.  But  we  will  be 
faithful  as  the  white  man  always  is  faithful  toward 
a  down-trodden  and  manifestly  inferior  race. 

'  There  is  no  race  question  in  America.  The 
white  men  are  bound  to  run  things,  whether  in  Il 
linois  or  in  Georgia,  and  the  negro  will  survive 
where  the  Indian  perished  merely  because  he  does 
not  resist.  If  he  did  resist  he  would  be  annihilated. 
This  condition  is  not  peculiar  to  the  South,  for  the 
Indian  was  driven  out  of  New  England  quite  as  re 
lentlessly  as  out  of  Georgia,  and  if  over  fifty  per 
cent  of  the  population  of  Chicago  were  black  to-day, 
as  they  are  in  Savannah,  the  white  men  of  Chicago 
would  keep  control  just  the  same  as  they  do  here 
in  the  schools,  in  the  courts,  in  the  churches,  and 
in  the  homes. 

"  The  black  man  must  be  subordinated  for  many 
generations  to  come;  and  even  when  he  reaches  a 
plane  of  comparative  equality  he  must  still  remain 
a  separate  factor  in  the  community;  he  cannot 
become  amalgamated,  except  perhaps  at  the  expira 
tion  of  hundreds  of  years. 


The  Southerner's  Point  of  View     151 

'  The  white  people  have  made  themselves  the 
masters  of  the  world — not  by  conciliation,  and  not 
always  by  merit,  but  because  when  they  found  a 
race  of  men  unwilling  or  unfit  to  amalgamate  with 
them,  they  promptly  pushed  their  enemies  out  of  the 
way.  It  must  be  so  always.  Here  in  Georgia  we 
fought  the  Indian  with  all  the  power  at  our  com 
mand  until  as  late  as  1840.  There  are  no  Indians 
in  Georgia  now,  because  the  Indian  resisted  the  en 
croachment  of  the  whites  and  was  swept  out  of  the 
way.  The  salvation  of  the  negro  lies  in  the  fact 
that  he  is  of  a  weak  race.  He  does  not  fight.  He 
never  resists  in  a  body.  Now  and  then  he  kills  a 
single  white  man,  but  it  is  through  fear  and  not 
through  resentment.  The  result  is  that  the  negro 
will  survive  where  the  red  man  perished,  although 
the  negro  is  infinitely  less  desirable  as  a  citizen,  and 
although  the  Indian  has  been  successfully  bred  into 
the  white  race  without  any  feeling  of  disgust  being 
created  by  the  union. 

"  We  people  here  in  the  South  do  not  like  to  dis 
cuss  the  negro  question,  because  we  do  not  like  to 
attack  the  race  as  a  whole.  They  were  brought  up 
with  us  in  our  childhood,  and  we  all  know  many 
clean,  honest,  loyal,  and  moral  coloured  people. 
Their  number  is  even  growing  as  the  result  of  edu 
cation  and  civilization.  It  is  a  painful  fact,  how 
ever,  of  which  we  do  not  talk,  merely  to  save  the 
feelings  of  the  better  class  of  negroes,  that  the 


152         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

great  mass  of  their  race  is  deep  in  a  barbaric  im 
morality,  of  the  extent  of  which  the  Northern  peo 
ple  have  no  conception. 

"  You  must  bear  in  mind  the  fact  that  the  negro, 
as  we  have  him  here  to-day,  is  at  the  best  not  over 
a  century  away  from  the  grossest  and  most  de 
basing  savagery.  The  morals  of  the  savage,  in 
cluding  the  negro  quite  as  much  as  the  Indian,  are 
little  better  than  those  of  the  animal;  and  this  em 
braces  both  sexes.  Part  of  this  is  due  to  the  de 
basing  effect  of  slavery,  but  a  greater  part  of  it  is 
hereditary  instinct,  traceable  over  the  one  short  cen 
tury  to  a  life  of  absolute  degradation,  no  better  than 
that  of  the  wild  beasts  with  which  the  African 
negro  was  surrounded. 

"  It  would  be  difficult  to  find  a  community  of 
white  men  where  there  were  many  openly  living  in 
idleness  upon  the  fruits  of  the  sale  of  their  wives, 
their  mothers,  and  their  sisters.  These  are  harsh 
words,  I  know,  but  the  people  of  the  North  must 
face  the  truth.  The  black  man  as  he  exists  in  the 
South  to-day  is  unfit  for  any  association  with  white 
men  or  white  women.  As  he  becomes  educated  he 
will  grow  out  of  all  this,  but  until  he  does  grow  out 
of  it  it  is  manifest  that  he  must  be  treated  as  an 
inferior. 

'  This  question  of  the  immorality  of  the  blacks 
is  one  seldom  referred  to  by  Southern  men,  but 
their  silence  is  a  matter  of  abstract  kindness  to- 


The  Southerner's  Point  of  View     153 

wards  these  poor  barbarians.  The  existence  of  this 
gross  immorality,  which  perhaps  could  better  be 
called  immorality,  is  not  even  a  matter  of  argu 
ment.  It  can  be  and  will  be  eradicated  by  the 
schools  and  the  churches,  but  at  the  present  time  it 
still  exists  in  an  appalling  degree. 

"  Amalgamation  has  practically  stopped  here  in 
the  South.  Every  time  I  go  North  I  am  told — es 
pecially  in  New  York — of  cases  where  black  men 
have  married  white  women.  I  do  not  know  how 
common  these  marriages  are,  but  they  are  not  im 
portant,  because  the  number  of  coloured  people  in 
the  North  is  comparatively  so  small.  Here  in  the 
South  it  is  quite  evident  that  the  mulatto  is  dying 
out,  not  at  all  because  he  is  of  poor  constitution,  but 
because  the  supply  has  stopped.  The  half-breed 
is  not  marrying  among  the  whites  but  among  the 
blacks,  and  the  result  is  a  shading  off  of  the  negroes 
from  pure  black  to  brown,  and  the  gradual  elimina 
tion  of  the  quadroon  and  the  octoroon. 

"  Improper  relations  between  the  white  men  and 
black  women  are  extremely  rare  nowadays.  Such 
relations  at  one  time  were  at  least  not  unusual,  but 
to-day  a  white  man  even  of  the  lowest  class  who 
should  openly  admit  that  he  sustained  improper  re 
lations  with  a  woman  of  the  black  race  would  be 
shunned  by  every  one,  and  probably  would  be  driven 
out  of  his  community,  if  not  by  force  at  least  by 
the  impulse  of  public  opinion.  The  mulatto  chil- 


154         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

dren  are  becoming  fewer  and  fewer,  and  they  are 
the  result  almost  entirely  of  unions  between  negro 
women  and  the  lower  class  of  white  men  who  have 
come  here  from  the  North  and  have  not  been  here 
long  enough  to  understand  that  such  unions  are 
revolting  to  the  mass  of  the  community  here. 

"  If  the  Republicans  had  not  made  such  an  awful 
blunder  from  a  political  standpoint  by  attempting 
to  give  the  negro  the  ballot,  the  white  race  ultimately 
would  have  been  at  the  mercy  of  the  blacks  in  the 
South.  This  seems  paradoxical,  but  it  is  true.  If 
the  Northern  people  had  freed  the  negro  and  then 
let  him  alone  entirely,  the  result  would  have  been 
that  the  Southern  whites  would  have  been  forced  to 
do  a  great  deal  for  the  negro  from  mere  sympathy. 
They  would  have  found  him  even  more  beggared 
than  they  were  themselves,  and  they  would  have 
taken  him  up,  helped  him  along,  and  provided  for 
him  as  they  did  during  slavery  days,  at  the  same 
time  allowing  him  to  remain  a  free  agent. 

'  The  black  man  was  faithful  to  us  all  during 
the  war.  He  preserved  our  buried  silverware,  he 
took  faithful  care  of  our  wives  and  children,  he 
did  not  betray  his  trust  at  any  time,  although  he 
well  understood  that  the  success  of  the  Yankee  army 
meant  his  freedom.  The  relations  between  the  mas 
ter  and  the  man  were  such  after  the  war  that  if 
left  alone,  the  loyalty  of  the  black  man  to  the  white 
would  have  been  as  strong  as  ever.  As  a  result, 


The  Southerner's  Point  of  View     155 

when  in  the  fulness  of  time  they  were  given  the 
ballot,  the  blacks  would  all  have  been  Democrats 
like  their  masters.  We  should  thus  have  built  up 
on  terms  of  comparative  equality  an  alien  black  race, 
united  to  us  by  political  ties,  fostered  by  a  friendly 
supervision,  and  made  so  strong  that  in  the  end 
they  must  have  controlled  the  destinies  of  the  South. 

"  But  the  attempt  to  give  the  negro  the  ballot, 
his  appointment  to  important  offices,  and  the  horri 
ble  events  of  the  reconstruction  period,  opened  the 
eyes  of  all  in  the  South  to  the  danger  which  threat 
ened  them.  They  saw  that  they  could  not  afford  to 
foster  the  idea  of  equality  between  white  and  black, 
either  at  the  polls  or  anywhere  else.  So  the  sym 
pathy  between  the  old  slave-holding  class  and  their 
former  slaves  was  wiped  out  by  the  attempt  to  give 
the  negro  the  ballot. 

'  The  failure  of  that  attempt  was  the  best  thing 
that  ever  happened  to  the  South.  It  forced  us  to 
learn  what  I  said  at  first,  that  this  is  a  white  man's 
government,  and  that  the  republic  itself  cannot  pos 
sibly  exist  except  under  the  government  of  white 
men.  The  negroes  themselves  recognize  this  fact 
now,  and  the  more  intelligent  of  them  readily  admit 
that  their  attempt  to  secure  equal  rights  by  means 
of  the  ballot  was  worse  than  failure,  because  they 
have  now  not  only  been  deprived  of  the  ballot  under 
colour  of  law,  but  they  have  also  seen  fade  away 
from  them  the  old  sympathy,  the  pity,  and  paternal 


156         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

protection  which  the  white  people  of  the  South  ex 
tended  to  the  negro  before  the  war,  and  which  the 
negro  to  this  day  cannot  do  without. 

"  Just  leave  the  negroes  alone.  Remember  that 
we  are  dealing  with  a  problem  as  old  as  the  world. 
Modern  civilization,  such  as  we  know  it,  dates  from 
Cromwell  and  from  Luther.  It  was  born  of  civil 
and  religious  liberty.  It  has  taken  us  a  long  time 
to  get  where  we  are  now,  and  yet  we  have  behind 
us  traditions  and  hereditary  influences  all  the  way 
from  Moses,  Phidias,  and  St.  Paul. 

'  The  negro  is  a  century  out  of  savagery.  Give 
him  time,  and  he  will  build  himself  up  far  above 
the  plane  upon  which  he  now  is;  but  in  the  nature 
of  things  he  can  hardly  hope  to  catch  up  with  the 
white  man,  who  will  be  progressing  at  the  same 
time. 

"  The  field  of  the  American  negro,  I  firmly  be 
lieve,  is  in  Africa.  That  great  dark  continent  is 
as  yet  almost  wholly  uncivilized.  The  British,  the 
Germans,  and  the  French  are  shooting  bullets  into 
the  black  people  over  there,  but  they  are  not  build 
ing  schoolhouses  nor  starting  newspapers,  and  they 
have  not  even  begun  to  teach  the  African  negro  how 
to  help  himself,  as  we  have  taught  the  American 
negro. 

'  The  battle  for  civilization  which  must  be  waged 
in  Africa  can  best  be  led  by  the  American  negro. 
He  is  the  natural  missionary  to  his  own  race,  and 


The  Southerner's  Point  of  View     157 

he  could  profitably  go  back  there,  not  as  an  indi 
vidual,  but  in  communities.  We  should  send  back 
to  Africa  not  our  own  ignorant  and  degraded  ne 
groes,  but  our  best,  our  most  moral,  and  our  most 
highly  educated  negroes.  As  fast  as  we  complete 
in  them  the  work  of  civilization,  they  can  be  ab 
sorbed  readily  in  the  missionary  work  of  Africa. 
As  to  their  position  in  this  country,  no  man  who 
has  studied  the  question  at  first  hand  can  possibly 
expect  to  see  the  negro  anything  but  an  inferior. 
He  is  not  a  white  man  with  a  black  skin,  and  he 
will  always  be  centuries  behind  the  white  man  in 
the  race  for  a  still  higher  and  better  civilization. 

"  In  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  negroes  pay  only 
three  per  cent  of  the  entire  school  tax  of  the  South, 
we  are  now  turning  out  about  100,000  educated 
negroes  annually.  Of  these,  about  10,000  find  places 
here  in  the  South.  The  remaining  90,000  find  it 
impossible  to  secure  positions  which  are  in  accord 
with  all  their  new  dignity  as  educated  men.  They 
have  the  idea  quite  generally  that  education  is  more 
or  less  a  white  man's  trick,  by  means  of  which  he 
manages  to  live  without  working.  The  educated 
negro  will  not  work  in  the  field,  nor  do  hard  manual 
labour.  Our  educated  surplus  of  90,000,  therefore, 
is  all  going  North.  The  Northern  States  are  get 
ting  every  year  about  as  many  negroes  as  there  are 
now  in  the  State  of  Illinois. 

"  We  could  not  afford  to  have  the  movement  of 


158         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

population  progress  too  rapidly,  or  we  should  be  out 
of  labourers.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  there 
is  a  counter  current.  Year  by  year,  farmers  from 
the  North  and  the  Northwest  are  selling  out  farms 
worth  one  hundred  dollars  an  acre,  coming  South, 
and  buying  equally  as  good  land  at  from  three  to 
ten  dollars  an  acre.  These  men  are  taking  the  place 
of  the  negro;  and  in  my  judgment  the  time  is  not 
far  distant  when  the  agriculture  of  the  South,  except 
perhaps  the  cotton,  will  be  in  the  hands  of  these 
Northern  farmers,  who  are  bringing  with  them 
energy,  new  methods,  a  little  surplus  capital,  and 
the  willingness  to  work  with  their  hands;  and  who 
reach  the  conviction  almost  immediately  after  their 
arrival  that  the  negro  is  desirable  neither  as  an 
employee  nor  as  a  neighbour. 

"  So  it  is  that  our  surplus  of  educated  negroes, 
most  of  them,  is  going  northward,  and  the  North 
ern  farmers  are  coming  southward,  an  operation  by 
which  every  one  must  at  once  see  that  the  South  is 
the  gainer." 


Ill 

Theories  of  Solution 

IN  the  case  of  the  negro  problem,  as  in  almost 
every  other  problem  whose  solution  has  not 
yet  been  worked  out  by  experience,  there  are 
almost  as  many  theories  suggested  as  to  how  to 
solve  it  as  there  are  individuals  interested  in  the 
subject.  No  theory  can  be  established  till  it  has 
stood  the  test  of  time  and  of  actual  experiment ;  yet 
some  seem  more  practicable  than  others.  Among 
the  Southerners  who  cling  to  the  old  ideal  of  emi 
gration  as  the  best  means  of  disposing  of  the  negro 
is  a  certain  well-known  citizen  of  Charleston,  whose 
view  differs,  however,  from  that  of  most  educated 
Southern  whites.  He  argues  as  follows,  with  Stan 
ley's  "  Darkest  Africa  "  as  a  basis  for  his  argument : 

"  Our  negroes  were  from  the  Congo  country. 
When  they  were  captured  by  the  slave  traders  they 
were  already  slaves  to  black  men,  and  their  an 
cestors  had  been  before  them  for  centuries.  They 
were  the  lowest  and  most  degraded  of  the  African 
negroes. 

"  There  was  a  wave  of  African  emigration  from 
Persia  down  the  east  coast  of  the  continent  which 

159 


160         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

represented  the  best  element  in  Africa.  This  is  only 
a  fringe,  however,  and  can  be  traced  to  this  day, 
including  tribes  like  the  Zulus  and  similar  African 
races,  whose  people  are  fighters. 

"  I  remember  when  I  was  a  boy  on  the  planta 
tion  there  were  certain  men  among  the  slaves  who 
were  constantly  being  punished  by  the  overseers, 
who  fought  against  slavery,  who  ran  away  to  the 
swamps,  and  who  rebelled  against  the  white  man  in 
every  possible  direction.  These  men  generally  had 
much  better  minds  than  the  others,  and  were  pos 
sessed  of  native  ferocity,  both  of  which  qualities  can 
be  accounted  for  by  the  fact  that  they  were  strag 
gling  members  of  the  superior  nations  of  Africa, 
who  had  been  swept  along  with  the  great  wave  of 
Congo  slaves. 

"  Our  black  man,  brought  to  us  by  the  slave  trad 
ers  and  paid  for  with  New  England  guns  and  glass 
beads,  was  a  degraded  creature.  I  say  this  not  to 
attack  the  negroes  at  all,  but  simply  to  explain  what 
the  people  of  the  South  have  long  understood  and 
what  the  people  of  the  North  seem  determined  not 
to  understand,  that  we  have  to  deal  with  a  creature 
so  low  in  the  scale  of  human  intelligence  at  the  start 
that  he  is  necessarily  unfitted  for  association  with 
the  whites.  It  will  take  generations  of  training  here 
to  obliterate  the  degradation  of  generations  of  slav 
ery  in  Africa  before  he  came  here." 

The  remedy  which  this  student  of  the  race  prob- 


Theories  of  Solution  161 

lem  unhesitatingly  proposed  was  the  return  of  the 
negroes  to  Africa.  "  This,"  he  said,  "  must  be  done 
by  government  action.  I  would  not  attempt  to  ship 
all  the  negroes  at  once,  nor  would  I  do  it  by  force  or 
indiscriminately.  I  would  train  the  negro  as  well 
as  I  could  here,  and  endeavour  to  make  things 
so  pleasant  for  him  in  Liberia  that  it  would  be 
a  prize  to  secure  transportation  to  his  native 
land. 

"  Clement  Irons,  a  negro,  made  a  successful  start 
in  this  direction  and  took  a  black  colony  to  Liberia, 
which  I  believe  is  eminently  successful.  The  negro 
is  the  natural  missionary  to  uplift  Africa,  and  I 
cannot  understand  why  our  people  in  the  South 
have  opposed  the  emigration  of  the  negro  and  have 
adopted  restrictive  laws,  such  as  that  which  drove 
out  of  the  country  the  famous  '  Peg  Leg  Williams/ 
who  was  seeking  to  secure  labour  for  the  North. 

"If  the  coloured  people  are  encouraged  to  secure 
their  political  rights  in  the  South  at  the  present 
time,  there  will  be  bloodshed  in  the  long  run.  The 
horrors  of  reconstruction  no  man  can  tell.  They 
cannot  be  repeated.  This  is  a  white  man's  country, 
and  you  cannot  logically  insist  that  the  negro  shall 
exercise  political  functions  so  long  as  you  bar  out 
the  Chinaman  and  refuse  to  allow  him  to  become 
naturalized.  The  North  was  wise  enough  to  see 
its  danger  in  this  respect  before  it  was  too  late. 
If  we  ever  let  down  the  bars  now  raised  against  the 


162         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

Chinese,  the  North  will  have  a  race  question  of  its 
own,  which  it  would  solve  exactly  as  we  are  solv 
ing  ours  here  in  the  South,  by  holding  the  control 
of  the  government  at  all  hazards." 

A  less  drastic  and  more  practicable,  if  somewhat 
easy-going  method  is  that  advocated  by  Mr.  Stone 
of  Greenville,  already  quoted  in  these  pages,  who 
believes  in  letting  things  take  care  of  themselves, 
leaving  time  to  work  out  the  solution,  by  natural 
processes.  Nothing  can  be  done,  as  he  thinks,  to 
render  race  friction  less  acute,  except  to  wait.  "  No 
ill-tempered  agitation,"  said  he,  "  either  by  whites 
or  by  negroes,  will  do  the  slightest  good.  I  believe, 
however,  that  the  people  of  the  North  are  grad 
ually  coming  to  understand  that  the  South  is  con 
fronted  with  a  great  social  problem,  and  that  the 
South  must  solve  it  sooner  or  later.  If  the  negro 
could  be  dispersed  throughout  the  entire  country 
it  is  true  that  he  would  be  swallowed  up,  but  this 
is  an  impossibility  at  the  present  time.  The  negro 
has  no  money  to  move  away,  and  besides  that,  his 
labour  is  necessary  to  the  continued  prosperity  of 
the  South,  unless  we  can  find  a  substitute  for  it. 
Few  Northern  men  understand  either  the  peculiar 
characteristics  of  the  negro  and  his  inability  to  take 
care  of  himself,  or  the  generally  friendly  attitude 
of  the  Southern  people  towards  him.  We  do  not 
hate  the  negro;  Northern  people  who  say  so  are 
simply  ignorant  of  the  situation.  We  were  brought 


Theories  of  Solution  163 

up  with  the  negro,  and  I  think  we  understand  his  ca 
pacity  and  are  much  more  tender  for  his  faults  than 
Northern  people  would  be.  In  return  for  this  the 
South  should  have  credit  for  an  honest  desire  to  do 
the  best  thing  possible  for  the  negro.  We  need 
his  labour;  it  is  to  our  interest  to  make  him  self- 
supporting,  inasmuch  as  the  South  is  an  agricultural 
country,  and  inasmuch  as  there  is  no  living  being 
who  knows  so  well  how  to  take  care  of  the  cotton 
plant  as  the  American  negro." 

Clark  Howell,  the  Atlanta  editor,  believes  that 
work  is  the  solution  of  the  vexed  question.  He 
believes  that  his  city  is  solving  the  problem  in  the 
right  way.  "  Just  look  out  of  that  window  there," 
he  said  one  day  in  his  office,  pointing  to  a  huge 
skyscraper  in  process  of  erection.  I  could  readily 
see  that  a  decided  majority  of  the  workmen  engaged 
upon  it  was  coloured.  They  were  working  appar 
ently  in  entire  harmony  with  their  white  associates, 
laying  brick,  setting  iron  beams,  doing  the  ordinary 
constructive  work,  an  integral  part  of  the  mar 
vellous  revolution  going  on  here  in  the  commercial 
and  industrial  metropolis  of  the  South. 

"  Just  look  at  those  men,"  continued  the  editor. 
'  They  don't  need  any  politics,  because  they  have 
work,  and  they  are  doing  work  for  which  they  are 
eminently  fitted.  Come  down  here  on  Labour  Day 
and  you  can  see  the  coloured  members  of  the  dif 
ferent  unions  marching  in  the  same  parade  with 


164         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

white  workmen.  The  negro  makes  an  excellent 
artisan,  and  by  supplying  him  with  work  for  which 
he  is  adapted  we  are  doing  the  proper  thing  to  solve 
the  so-called  negro  question,  which  is  not  a  race 
question  so  much  as  one  of  the  adjustment  of  social 
differences." 

Sitting  later  with  Mr.  Howell  on  the  broad 
veranda  of  the  Piedmont  Driving  Club,  and  looking 
up  the  beautiful  valley  through  which  Sherman 
marched  after  the  decisive  battle  of  Peach  Tree 
Creek,  I  listened  as  the  editor  told  of  how  as  a 
boy  he  made  his  pocket  money  by  gathering  up  the 
flattened  bullets  which  he  raked  out  of  the  ground 
of  the  old  intrenchments.  And  I  began  to  wonder 
that  the  Southern  white  people,  who  suffered  so 
much  and  so  recently  first  by  the  war  and  then  by 
reconstruction,  are  so  temperate,  so  patient,  and  so 
conservative  in  the  presence  of  a  political  and  social 
question  which  seems  to  threaten  their  very  exist 
ence. 

There  are  undoubtedly  two  sides  to  the  negro 
question,  and  it  is  probably  quite  true  that  the 
Southern  whites  are  not  altogether  right  in  their 
methods.  It  is  also  true,  however,  that  they  are 
on  the  ground,  that  they  are  the  people  most  af 
fected,  and  that  those  persons  in  the  North  who 
are  too  vigorously  shouting  for  an  immediate  ad 
justment  of  this  great  problem  ought  to  learn  a 
lesson  in  temperateness  and  courtesy  from  these 


Theories  of  Solution  165 

young  men  of  the  new  South,  who  are  patiently 
waiting  until  the  North  comes  around  to  their  opin 
ion,  and  who,  in  the  meantime,  with  unique  bravery, 
if  perhaps  through  some  mistaken  notions,  have 
successfully  turned  backward  a  great  black  wave 
which  they  believed  was  about  to  overwhelm 
them. 

Casual  observation  about  the  streets  of  Atlanta  by 
day  and  at  night,  with  some  walks  and  drives  into 
the  country,  tend  to  confirm  the  statement  made  by 
Mr.  Howell  that  when  a  sufficiency  of  the  proper 
kind  of  work  is  provided  for  the  negro  the  race 
question,  as  a  question,  disappears. 

Atlanta  is  the  focus  of  a  great  industrial  and 
commercial  revolution,  the  like  of  which  has  not 
often  been  seen,  but  which  is  nearly  equal  to  the 
marvellous  growth  of  Chicago.  The  city  has  grown 
beyond  all  belief;  the  country  round  about  is  pros 
perous  ;  there  is  plenty  of  money  for  legitimate  com 
mercial  operations;  cotton  is  enormously  high,  and 
the  negro  is  sharing  in  the  general  prosperity. 

Atlanta  is  something  like  twelve  hundred  feet 
above  the  sea  level,  and  there  is  something  in  the 
air  which  produces  energy  and  progressiveness. 
The  negroes  have  caught  this  spirit  on  the  bound. 
In  Charleston  and  in  Savannah,  even  on  the  busiest 
down  town  streets,  there  are  scores  and  hundreds 
of  idle,  ragged,  frequently  dissolute  negroes.  I 
was  told  by  one  negro  that  his  people  did  not  like 


166         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

Atlanta  overmuch,  but  preferred  the  old-fashioned 
Southern  towns,  like  Charleston  and  Jacksonville, 
the  latter  being,  he  said,  the  paradise  of  the  lazy 
Southern  negro.  But  in  Atlanta  no  excuse  is  made 
for  an  idle  negro,  and  the  lazy  ones  drift  away  to 
other  places,  where  their  presence  on  the  streets  is 
not  a  subject  of  comment,  while  one  sees  an  ex 
traordinarily  small  number  of  negroes  on  the  streets 
of  Atlanta.  The  negro  population  is  at  work  as 
far  as  one  can  judge,  and  is  correspondingly  con 
tented  and  peaceable.  The  condition  of  things  is 
a  proof  of  the  good  sense  and  value  of  the  indus 
trial  answer  to  the  negro  question.  There  are  some 
old-fashioned  and  decaying  Southern  cities  which 
would  be  much  better  off  financially  and  socially  if 
they  could  find  work  for  all  the  negroes  who  are 
willing  to  work,  and  drive  all  the  others  out  of  the 
city,  as  Atlanta  has  done. 

An  experiment  of  this  industrial  sort  was  once 
tried  in  Charleston,  whose  citizens  believed  that  they 
had  discovered  what  to  do  with  the  negro  when 
they  started  a  cotton  mill,  to  be  run  with  negro 
labour.  Ex-Mayor  Smyth  told  of  the  outcome. 
"  At  first,"  he  said,  "  it  seemed  as  if  the  mill  were 
to  be  a  great  success.  The  negro  is  a  good  imi 
tator,  he  readily  learned  the  work  of  the  cotton 
mill,  and  while  he  was  at  work  proved  himself  a 
valuable  man. 

"  The  difficulty   which    we   had   not   anticipated 


Theories  of  Solution  167 

arose  from  the  fact  that  the  negro  would  not  under 
any  circumstances  work  steadily.  The  minute  he 
got  a  little  money  ahead  he  would  quit  entirely  until 
the  money  was  gone.  This  was  fatal  to  the  cotton 
mill  experiment,  because  the  successful  manufacture 
of  such  a  product  requires  the  continued  operation 
of  the  machinery  by  skilled  labour.  The  cotton 
mill  proved  a  failure  for  no  other  reason  than  this 
unwillingness  of  the  negro  to  work  steadily,  so  that 
we  could  depend  upon  the  constant  supply  of  work 
men  who  would  know  how  to  operate  the  ma 
chinery.  The  machinery  in  the  Charleston  cotton 
mill  was  taken  to  pieces  and  set  up  again  at  Gaines 
ville,  where  it  was  afterwards  destroyed  by  a  cy 
clone." 

Dr.  DuBois,  the  Atlanta  educator,  also  inclines 
toward  an  industrial  solution,  but  not  so  much  along 
lines  of  providing  work  as  of  industrial  education. 
According  to  him,  the  work  of  negro  upbuilding  is 
a  much  wider  thing  than  in  the  accepted  view  of  it. 
"  We  have  to  do,"  he  said,  "  not  only  with  the  mil 
lions  of  coloured  people  here  in  the  United  States, 
but  with  the  other  millions  in  the  islands  and  the 
rest  of  America,  and  ultimately  with  the  hundreds 
of  millions  who  still  remain  in  degradation  in 
Africa." 

His  plan  of  campaign  would  be  a  concentration 
of  effort  for  higher  education  among  half  a  dozen 
colleges  in  the  Southern  States.  "  The  course  of 


1 68         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

instruction  in  the  others  should  be  curtailed  so  as 
to  give  them  the  rank  of  academies  and  preparatory 
schools,  to  correspond  about  with  the  New  Eng 
land  high  school  grade.  Just  now  we  have  too 
many  institutions  which  are  intermediate  between 
the  high  school  and  the  smaller  New  England 
college.  If  we  could  have  a  half-dozen  good  insti 
tutions  of  the  New  England  college  type,  better 
than  normal  schools  and  not  so  ambitious  as  great 
universities,  supplemented  with  a  dozen  or  twenty 
first-class  academies  of  the  high  school  grade,  we 
would  then  be  prepared  to  attack  the  problem  of  the 
primary  education  of  the  negro,  and  to  reach  the 
two-thirds  of  the  negro  population  now  outside  of 
school  influence.  There  is  need  not  of  one  Tuske- 
gee,  but  of  a  dozen.  Mr.  Washington  is  not  doing 
more  than  to  take  care  of  the  material  in  his  own 
State,  and  the  example  he  has  set  should  be  followed 
by  the  establishment  of  at  least  one  similar  institu 
tion  in  every  State  in  the  South." 

That  able  lawyer  and  philanthropist  of  Washing 
ton,  Mr.  Hart,  advocates  the  need  of  both  educa 
tion  and  the  suffrage  as  the  salvation  for  his  people. 
To  the  question,  "  What  is  the  matter  with  the 
South,  and  what  must  be  done  about  it  ?  "  he  replied, 
with  the  following  scholarly  treatment  of  the 
subject : 

'  The  greatest  blight  upon  the  Southern  States 
is  still  the  one  influence  of  slavery,   from  which 


Theories  of  Solution  169 

neither  blacks  nor  whites  have  been  able  to  escape. 
Yet  the  interests  of  both  black  and  white  in  the 
South  are  identical.  What  helps  one  helps  the 
other,  and  a  hindrance  to  one  is  a  hindrance  to  the 
other.  They  are  actually  neighbours  now,  and  they 
ought  to  be  friends. 

"  The  South  to-day  has  marvellous  natural  re 
sources,  scarcely  yet  touched,  and  a  widely  scattered 
and  sparse  population.  Its  marshes  are  undrained, 
its  streams  unbridged,  its  richest  land  undeveloped. 
It  holds  the  monopoly  of  one  of  the  essential  prod 
ucts  of  civilization — cotton.  The  Western  States, 
Russia,  Argentina,  and  Australia  will  feed  the 
world,  but  the  south  Atlantic  States,  with  their 
fields  of  fleece,  must  clothe  the  world.  The  demand 
for  cotton  will  increase  but  the  area  of  production 
cannot  be  enlarged.  With  such  a  staple  in  its  pos 
session,  what  is  known  as  the  black  belt  of  America 
must  necessarily  be  prosperous  from  a  material 
point  of  view,  and  white  and  black  alike  must  be 
the  beneficiaries  of  that  prosperity. 

"  To  develope  these  extraordinary  resources  there 
is  need  of  two  things  and  two  things  only.  First 
of  all,  there  must  be  capital,  and  that  capital  must 
come  from  without  the  South.  Secondly,  there  must 
be  a  development  of  citizenship,  and  this  element 
must  come  from  within  the  South.  There  is  need 
to  have  the  people  educated  in  the  knowledge  of  the 
possibilities  of  the  country  and  in  the  skill  of  turn- 


170         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

ing  those  possibilities  to  account.    This  can  be  done 
in  no  other  way  but  in  the  schools. 

'  There  is  a  crying  need  throughout  the  whole 
South  for  common-school  facilities.  There  is  noth 
ing  which  approaches  the  common-school  system  of 
the  North  and  Northwest.  The  ignorance  is  not 
entirely  confined  to  the  coloured  people,  but  there 
are  many  rural  whites  in  the  South  who  have  prac 
tically  no  education,  not  from  any  fault  of  their 
own  but  because  the  country  is  too  poor  to  give 
it.  The  difference  in  communities  is  in  the  men, 
and  the  difference  in  the  men  is  in  their  mental 
development.  Harvard,  Brown,  Yale,  Dartmouth, 
Williams,  are  the  causes  which  have  made  and  still 
make  New  England  different  from  New  Guinea." 
In  further  analysis  of  the  actual  conditions  in 
the  South  to-day,  this  quadroon  philosopher  con 
tinued  :  "  The  excessive  conservatism  of  the  South 
grows  out  of  the  passions  and  the  prejudices  of 
her  past  history.  The  only  way  to  overcome  this 
is  to  develope  another  passion  which  shall  be 
stronger  than  the  one  it  is  to  supplant.  That,  it 
seems  to  me,  must  be  the  passion  of  an  enlightened 
self-interest,  which  desires  for  itself  the  same 
progress  which  has  resulted  in  the  prosperity  and 
the  happiness  of  other  communities.  There  must  be 
a  willingness  to  take  the  same  means  which  have 
been  found  effective  in  other  places  to  accomplish 
this  result. 


Theories  of  Solution  171 

"  Just  at  the  present  time  the  South  is  showing 
a  disposition  towards  self-examination  as  to  educa 
tional  needs.  This  is  the  thin  edge  of  the  wedge. 
Sentiments,  views,  and  policies  from  without  are 
proving  helpful  in  readjusting  matters  in  the  South 
in  harmony  with  the  inexorable  demands  of  mod 
ern  progress. 

"  The  great  pity  of  it  all  is  that  the  South  has 
not  the  means  to  provide  school  facilities  which 
shall  approach  in  completeness  those  in  the  East 
and  the  great  West.  The  war  did  two  terrible 
things  to  the  South.  It  exhausted  its  resources  and 
it  destroyed  its  most  promising  manhood.  Poverty 
retards  progress,  and  poverty  enforces  and  continues 
the  illiteracy  of  the  South.  Senator  Blair  was  the 
one  statesman  since  Lincoln  who  proposed  an  ade 
quate  and  certain  means  of  relief  which  should 
put  the  South  on  an  equal  footing  with  the  rest 
of  the  country.  The  failure  of  his  educational  bill 
and  his  retirement  from  Congress  was  a  calamity  to 
the  South.  The  Southern  people,  the  country,  and 
the  world  will  appreciate  this  fact  more  and  more 
as  time  passes,  and  will  suffer  more  and  more 
keenly,  until  public  sentiment  compels  the  enact 
ment  of  just  such  a  law  as  was  proposed  by  Senator 
Blair. 

"  The  country  owes  it  to  the  South  to  aid  her 
in  every  way  to  change  the  present  conditions,  which 
are  crushing  her  industries  and  which  threaten  the 


172         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

peace  and  prosperity  of  the  entire  country.  There 
is  no  reason  why  a  national  educational  fund  cannot 
be  provided  and  distributed  in  proportion  to  the  il 
literacy  of  the  different  States.  Our  institutions 
demand  the  education  of  the  masses,  and  the  whole 
country  must,  in  the  nature  of  things,  provide  the 
common  school  for  the  great  ignorant  masses  of 
the  coloured  population  in  the  South.  It  is  unfair 
to  expect  the  whites  of  the  Southern  States  to  bear 
the  entire  burden.  The  negro  question  is  both  na 
tional  and  sectional,  and  the  self-interest  of  the 
nation  itself  requires  that  an  end  shall  be  put  once 
and  for  all  to  the  terrible  illiteracy  among  the  ne 
groes  of  the  South. 

"  So  much  for  education.  Now  as  to  the  question 
of  suffrage  for  the  negro.  The  writ  of  the  Declara 
tion  of  Independence  must  run  throughout  the  land. 
A  house  divided  against  itself  cannot  stand.  The 
nation  cannot  endure  half  free  and  half  unfree,  nor 
one-third  unfree,  nor  one-tenth  unfree.  This  is  the 
foundation  principal  of  our  institutions  as  declared 
by  Jefferson,  Madison,  Adams,  Lincoln,  Wendell 
Phillips,  Whittier,  and  Charles  Sumner.  The  door 
of  hope,  the  field  of  opportunity  must  be  open,  must 
be  unobstructed  for  all  men  under  the  flag.  That  is 
the  inevitable  end  to  which  the  whole  people  must 
come,  and  it  is  toward  this  end  that  we  must  begin 
the  uplifting  and  upbuilding  of  the  ten  millions  of 
coloured  people  under  the  stars  and  stripes. 


Theories  of  Solution  173 

"  There  must  be  no  nostrums  and  there  can  be  no 
miracles.  The  negro  is  no  better  and  no  worse 
than  any  other  man  under  similar  conditions,  sim 
ilar  environment,  and  similar  heredity. 

"  The  negro  is  no  angel  either  of  light  or  of  dark 
ness.  He  is  just  a  man,  a  human  creature.  Adapta 
bility,  after  all,  is  entirely  a  matter  of  environment. 
The  negroes  have  become  skilled  in  the  things  their 
hands  have  found  to  do.  Thus  it  happens — but  it 
only  happens — that  the  negroes  know  how  to  plant, 
cultivate,  and  harvest  cotton  better  than  any  people 
in  the  world,  merely  because  they  have  the  start  of 
the  rest  of  the  world  by  about  a  century.  That  is 
all.  They  can  learn  other  things  in  the  same  way, 
and  it  is  idle  to  suppose  that  the  negro  is  limited 
in  his  capacity  in  any  particular  direction.  The 
Southern  people  must  learn  toleration,  which  will 
be  their  salvation.  Whites  as  well  as  blacks  in  the 
South  need  education  in  its  broadest  sense.  With 
this  they  need  the  most  advanced  training  in  agri 
culture,  to  enable  them  to  reach  a  thorough  knowl 
edge  of  the  best  use  of  the  soil,  the  marvellous 
soil,  of  the  section  where  their  lot  has  been  cast. 

"  In  the  end,  whatever  may  be  the  condition  now, 
the  right  of  suffrage  must  be  the  sword  and  the 
shield  of  all  the  people  of  a  democracy.  In  a 
monarchy  it  is  the  duty  of  the  nobles  to  guard,  pro 
tect,  and  help  the  subject  classes ;  but  in  a  democracy 
such  as  ours  the  ballot  is  absolutely  the  only  pro- 


174         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

tection  of  the  citizen,  and  it  is  as  necessary  in  the 
long  run  to  the  man  whose  skin  is  dark  as  to  him 
whose  skin  is  light.  When  the  race  question  is 
properly  settled,  it  can  only  be  on  the  theory  that 
the  perpetuity  of  a  nation  depends  upon  the  equality 
before  the  law  of  all  its  citizens.  The  coloured 
man  may  not  need  and  may  not  get  social  equality, 
but  he  does  need  and  should  get  equal  treatment 
in  the  eye  of  the  law,  which  is  guaranteed  to  him 
by  the  Declaration  of  Independence  and  by  the  great 
and  wise  amendments  to  the  Constitution  of  the 
United  States." 


IV 
What  Kind  of  Education? 

IT  is  noticeable  that  all  the  negro  leaders,  in  dis 
cussing  the  race  problem,  lay  emphasis  on  the 
need  of  education.  No  two  of  them,  however, 
seem  to  agree  as  to  just  what  direction  the  educative 
process  should  take.  As  we  have  seen,  William  H. 
H.  Hart  advocates  the  common  school,  Booker  T. 
Washington  the  industrial  institute,  and  Burghardt 
DuBois  desires  not  only  both  these  but  also  institu 
tions  of  higher  learning,  as  a  means  of  supply  for 
the  teaching  force  of  the  lower  schools.  He  claims 
that  there  is  no  foundation  for  the  constantly  re 
peated  assertion  that  the  negro  is  deficient  in  the 
reasoning  faculty,  hence  cannot  hope  to  receive  the 
benefits  of  higher  education.  According  to  his  ob 
servation,  the  negro  is  capable  of  almost  any  intel 
lectual  achievement — a  somewhat  sweeping  state 
ment,  which  would  hardly  be  true  of  any  race  of 
white  men,  taken  collectively.  However,  Dr.  Du 
Bois  defends  his  position  thus : 

'  The  negro  is  hampered  at  all  times  by  the  lack 
of  proper  home  training,  by  the  traditions  of  a  line 
of  uneducated  ancestors,  and  by  a  timidity  due  to 

175 


176         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

his  political  and  social  status.  As  to  his  natural 
capabilities,  however,  the  dull  negro  boy  seems  to 
be  on  a  par  with  any  other  dull  boy,  and  the  bright 
negro  is  nearly  identical  with  the  bright  white  boy. 
I  have  watched  the  negro  student  study  geometry, 
logic,  and  applied  mathematics,  going  into  matters 
in  the  arts  and  sciences  where  the  active  use  of 
the  reasoning  faculty  is  indispensable,  where  noth 
ing  can  be  accomplished  by  mere  memorizing. 

"  This  same  charge  has  been  repeated  many  times 
and  in  many  forms,  and  I  am  satisfied  that  it  comes 
invariably  from  people  who  have  not  been  actually 
engaged  in  teaching  coloured  children,  but  have 
worked  only  in  executive  positions,  where  they  ob 
serve  the  mass  of  the  coloured  people  but  do  not  get 
at  the  individual  at  all.  Few  white  people  nowa 
days  have  the  slightest  chance  to  get  at  the  negro 
at  close  range.  Our  more  highly  educated  negroes 
are  not  brought  into  contact  with  the  white  people 
at  all  now;  our  coloured  teachers,  educated  in  the 
coloured  colleges  by  coloured  men  and  women, 
are  teaching  only  coloured  children,  and  the  only 
white  man  they  come  in  contact  with  officially 
is  the  superintendent  of  schools,  with  whom 
the  relations  are,  of  course,  of  the  most  formal 
character. 

"  There  is  a  circle  of  coloured  society  in  Atlanta 
all  the  members  of  which  are  well  educated  and 
well  bred.  They  live  by  themselves,  associate  with 


What  Kind  of  Education?          177 

each  other,  and  do  not  mix  with  the  whites  in  any 
way  whatever.  Among  that  class  of  people  you 
will  find  the  same  mental  development  you  find 
among  people  of  the  same  class  in  Northern  cities, 
making  allowances  only  for  peculiar  social  condi 
tions  and  occasional  lack  of  family  training,  which 
is  perhaps  the  strongest  feature  in  the  culture  of  the 
white  man." 

What  seems  an  argument  in  contradiction  of  the 
contention  of  Dr.  DuBois  that  negro  teachers  are 
necessary  for  the  lower  schools  among  his  people, 
is  the  fact  that  in  Charleston  at  least  they  still  find 
it  necessary  to  employ  white  teachers  to  run  the 
public  schools  for  coloured  pupils.  An  interesting 
feature  in  this  case,  throwing  some  light  on  the 
Southern  view  of  social  relations,  is  the  refusal  of 
the  white  teachers  of  coloured  pupils  in  public 
schools  to  recognize  or  associate  with  the  white 
teachers  of  coloured  pupils  in  private  schools,  a 
sharp  distinction  being  thus  drawn  between  institu 
tions  to  uplift  the  coloured  people  under  govern 
ment  control,  and  those  which  are  under  the 
auspices  of  missionary  societies  and  private  in 
dividuals. 

One  at  least  of  the  group  of  educators  who  be 
lieve  the  negro  incapable  of  higher  education  has 
not  based  his  opinion  on  hasty  judgment  or  general 
observation.  Professor  Otis  Ashmore,  for  years 
superintendent  of  the  city  schools  of  Savannah,  has 


178         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

been  teaching  in  the  schools  of  Georgia  since  1876, 
and  what  he  says  grows  out  of  personal  touch  with 
negro  children.  At  the  time  when  I  talked  with 
him  he  had  direct  supervision  of  6,500  white  and 
10,700  coloured  children  between  six  and  eighteen 
years  of  age.  In  all  his  work  as  an  educator  he 
has  been  among  those  who  have,  as  he  expressed 
it,  "  been  sitting  steady  in  the  boat,  doing  the  best 
they  could  to  steer  to  some  safe  port."  He  has 
studied  especially  the  intellectual  capacity  of  the 
negro  as  shown  in  his  daily  work  in  school,  and 
the  result  is  startling. 

"  I  have  found,"  he  said,  "  that  the  negro  is  un 
doubtedly  deficient  in  the  reasoning  faculty.  This 
is  not  an  accident,  but  it  is  apparently  constitutional. 
The  negro  children  under  my  observation  display 
considerable  ability  in  matters  which  involve  only 
perception  and  memory.  In  fact,  in  harmony  with 
the  well-known  law  of  compensation,  the  deficiency 
in  the  reasoning  faculty  frequently  results  in  an 
added  strength  of  memory.  Allowing  for  associa 
tion  and  for  defective  home-training,  the  negro  boy 
frequently,  if  not  usually,  shows  the  same  capacity 
as  the  white  boy  in  mere  memorizing  of  lessons. 
It  is  at  about  the  age  of  fourteen,  as  educators  know, 
that  the  lessons  in  our  schools  begin  to  require  the 
constant  use  of  the  reasoning  faculty,  and  it  is  here 
that  the  negro  boy  begins  to  fall  behind  his  white 
competitor.  He  shows  himself  unquestionably  de- 


What  Kind  of  Education?          179 

ficient  in  logic.  He  is  unable  to  argue  from  cause 
to  effect,  and  when  he  cannot  memorize  he  fails. 

'  This  is  not  a  temporary  failing  of  the  negro. 
It  is  not  the  result  of  social  conditions,  nor  is  it 
the  result  of  slavery.  It  is  clearly  constitutional 
and  probably  racial,  and  sets  a  limit  to  the  present 
achievements  of  the  negro  race.  This  bar  may  be 
removed  by  generations  of  training,  but  it  does 
exist  to-day.  The  generation  with  which  we  are 
dealing  in  the  schools  is  at  least  the  second  since 
slavery,  but  the  child  is  repeatedly  like  the  father, 
comparatively  easy  to  perceive,  ready  to  memorize, 
but  incapable  of  anything  like  real  reasoning  power. 

"  Some  of  our  friends  in  the  North  have  been 
pouring  a  good  deal  of  money  into  institutions  for 
the  higher  education  of  the  negro.  We  have  not 
discouraged  this  generosity  and  will  not,  but  prac 
tically  all  that  money  is  wasted,  since  for  the  reason 
I  have  stated,  the  deficiency  in  the  reasoning  faculty, 
the  negro  is  unfitted  for  any  real  higher  education. 
There  are,  of  course,  occasional  exceptions  to  this 
rule,  but  in  these  exceptional  cases  the  negro  with 
anything  more  than  a  foundation  of  education  finds 
it  nearly  impossible  to  get  a  position  in  which  he 
can  employ  his  knowledge.  Even  his  own  race  will 
not  hire  him  as  a  lawyer,  a  doctor,  an  architect,  in 
any  of  the  learned  professions,  or  even  in  the  arts. 
The  negroes  turn  to  the  white  man  for  all  kinds 
of  assistance,  because  they  are  sure  that  the  white 


180         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

man  is  educated,  and  they  suspect  that  their  negro 
associate  is  not.  The  black  men  themselves  are  be 
ginning  dimly  to  realize  the  limit  which  nature  has 
set  upon  their  education. 

'  There  is  a  distinct  field  for  the  employment 
of  the  negro.  He  imitates  well,  he  learns  how  to 
do  things  with  his  own  hands,  and  where  it  is  a 
mere  matter  of  observation,  he  makes  a  plodding 
but  successful  skilled  mechanic.  Here  in  Savannah 
we  have  negro  carpenters,  bricklayers,  blacksmiths, 
plasterers,  and  other  mechanical  tradesmen.  They 
do  well  wherever  the  trade  is  of  such  a  character 
that  it  can  be  learned  by  observation;  but  wherever 
the  trade  requires  the  exercise  of  original  reasoning 
faculties  in  the  solving  of  mechanical  problems,  the 
negro  is  instantly  at  fault. 

"  The  negro  lacks  prevision  and  provision.  The 
farmer,  of  all  people  in  the  world,  needs  to  look 
ahead.  He  must  sow  to-day  in  order  to  reap  to 
morrow;  he  must  do  things  in  one  season  which 
are  to  have  results  in  another  season.  He  is  always 
anticipating  the  future.  The  negro  simply  finds 
it  impossible  to  do  this  successfully.  Hence  he  gen 
erally  makes  a  failure  as  an  independent  farmer, 
although  in  other  respects  he  has  quite  a  genius 
for  agriculture.  When  he  has  a  white  man  to  su 
perintend  his  labours  he  gets  along  well,  but  when 
he  is  working  for  himself  his  farm  soon  runs  down, 
and  an  investigation  will  inevitably  show  that  the 


What  Kind  of  Education?          181 

failure  is  due  to  his  constitutional  inability  to  look 
ahead.  He  will  chop  down  a  fruit  tree  in  the  win 
ter  regardless  of  the  fact  that  it  will  deprive  him 
of  the  fruit  in  the  summer;  this  is  because  it  seems 
necessary  to  him  to  sacrifice  the  fruit  tree  as  during 
the  warm  weather  he  forgot  to  cut  wood  for  the 
winter.  This  lack  of  the  reasoning  faculty  runs 
through  all  the  negroes,  and  hence  it  is  I  have 
become  convinced  that  the  salvation  of  the  race, 
if  there  is  a  salvation,  depends  upon  their  receiving 
first  of  all  a  common-school  education,  supple 
mented  with  manual  training  in  all  the  mechanical 
arts  which  can  be  learned  by  observation  and  imita 
tion,  and  without  the  use  of  the  reasoning  faculty. 
"  White  blood  tells  in  the  negro  every  time.  It 
is  frequently  the  case  that  an  apparently  black  man 
shows  a  certain  remarkable  strength  of  character, 
and  upon  inquiry  it  is  generally  found  that  a  com 
paratively  remote  ancestor  was  white.  The  union 
with  the  white  man  does  promote  intellectual  ac 
tivity  as  a  matter  of  course;  though  often  this  in 
tellectual  activity  is  grossly  misdirected,  because 
the  combination  is  not  natural,  and  the  white  man's 
mind  is  mixed  up  with  the  negro's  lack  of  it.  The 
hybrid  race  is  apparently  in  most  cases  physically 
inferior  to  both  the  white  and  the  black  races.  The 
combination,  therefore,  of  an  increased  mental  ac 
tivity  with  a  weak  physical  condition  is  far  from 
desirable.  The  black  people,  however,  long  to  be 


182         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

white,  and  there  is  a  persistent  tendency  among  the 
black  men  to  affiliate  themselves  with  the  yellow 
girls;  the  lighter  the  bride,  the  more  glory  there  is 
in  the  attachment. 

"  No  man  can  predict  the  future  of  the  black 
race.  Many  Southern  people  are  entirely  hopeless 
as  to  the  good  effect  of  any  education  whatever 
upon  the  blacks.  Naturally,  as  an  educator,  I  take 
the  ground  that  knowledge  is  better  than  ignorance 
under  all  conditions.  We  should  make  an  effort  first 
of  all  to  remove  the  actual  illiteracy  of  the  negro. 
The  higher  education  of  the  few  is  entirely  useless 
in  the  face  of  the  gross  ignorance  of  the  masses. 
The  educated  negro  must  depend  for  his  livelihood 
upon  his  own  race;  but  he  cannot  secure  support 
from  them  until  they  are  comparatively  self-sus 
taining,  and  they  cannot  be  that  until  they  have  the 
groundwork  of  an  education.  As  to  the  education) 
of  the  masses,  they  need  most  of  all  a  mere  founda-  • 
tion  in  reading,  writing,  spelling,  and  ordinary ! 
mathematics,  the  bare  common-school  branches. 
This  should  be  immediately  supplemented  by  careful 
instruction  in  the  use  of  the  hands,  a  general  indus 
trial  education,  and  training  in  ordinary  scientific 
agriculture.  All  this  should  be  done  by  practical 
lessons,  where  the  imitative  faculty  of  the  negro 
can  be  made  available,  and  almost  nothing  should 
be  left  to  his  reason. 

"  The  negro  seems  to  make  an  admirable  me- 


What  Kind  of  Education?          183 

chanic.  He  has  the  use  of  his  hands  to  an  ex 
traordinary  degree,  is  comparatively  docile,  and  if 
he  has  a  good  teacher  makes  a  good  pupil,  because 
he  is  a  good  imitator.  Here  in  Savannah  they  have 
gone  into  almost  all  the  ordinary  trades.  They 
have  no  success  at  all  in  the  arts,  because  they  have 
no  creative  faculty  whatever.  A  negro  painter  will 
lay  on  a  colour  successfully,  but  he  cannot  suggest 
shades  nor  create  colour  combinations.  Many  of 
the  negro  artisans  here  join  trade  unions  of  their 
own,  but  their  allegiance  does  not  sit  heavily  upon 
them.  The  negro  is  no  general,  he  cannot  plan  a 
campaign,  and  he  cannot  combine  successfully. 
This  makes  him  a  failure  as  a  trade  unionist,  but  it 
does  not  affect  his  individual  workmanship,  which 
is  generally  good. 

"  Here  in  Savannah  the  negro  population  pays 
less  than  two  per  cent  of  the  entire  taxation.  We 
have  in  this  State  a  poll  tax  which  goes  to  the  sup 
port  of  the  schools,  and  as  only  a  fraction  of  the 
negro  population  pay  this  tax,  while  they  pay  prac 
tically  nothing  in  real  estate  and  personal  taxes, 
which  also  go  to  support  the  public  schools,  it  is 
evident  that  the  burden  of  lifting  the  negro  race  out 
of  its  condition  of  profound  ignorance  has  to  be 
borne  by  the  white  people  of  the  South.  They  are 
doing  the  best  they  can,  but  it  must  be  remembered 
that  it  is  their  duty  to  educate  the  white  children, 
quite  as  much  as  the  black  children. 


184         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

"  Northern  people  who  complain  of  the  continued 
illiteracy  of  the  negro  shut  their  eyes  to  the  fact 
that  the  money  the  Northern  people  contribute  for 
the  education  of  the  negro  goes  to  schools  and  col 
leges,  while  the  Southern  white  people,  many  of 
whom  are  still  staggering  under  the  blighting  effect 
of  the  Civil  War,  are  compelled  not  only  to  endure 
the  presence  of  the  negroes,  but  to  educate  them  as 
well  in  the  common-school  branches,  which  is  all 
that  the  great  mass  of  the  negro  population  has 
any  time  for.  It  is  a  fact  which  it  is  well  to  stop 
and  ponder  upon,  that  one  coloured  institution,  the 
University  of  Atlanta,  has  a  larger  endowment  to 
day,  and  more  funds  at  its  disposal,  than  all  the 
higher  institutions  for  the  education  of  all  the  white 
people  in  the  entire  State  of  Georgia." 

A  broader  view  of  the  possibilities  of  negro  edu 
cation  is  taken  by  Dr.  H.  B.  Frissell,  well  known  as 
the  head  of  the  Hampton  Normal  and  Agricultural 
Institute  founded  by  General  Armstrong.  There  are 
probably  few  men  in  the  country  so  well  qualified 
to  speak  intelligently  as  to  the  mental  capacity  of 
the  negro.  And  that  subject  is  worth  enlightened 
attention,  for  it  is  evident  that  if  the  negro  is  capa 
ble  of  being  mentally  trained  to  any  degree,  his 
moral  and  physical  condition  will  in  a  few  genera 
tions  be  so  improved  that  he  will  no  longer  be  a 
menace  to  the  community. 

As    we    have    seen,    Southern    men,    educators, 


What  Kind  of  Education?          185 

editors,  statesmen,  and  business  men  alike,  unite  to 
say  that  the  negro  whom  they  know  so  well  at  close 
range  has  a  deficient  mental  organism  and  is  con 
stitutionally  unable  to  approximate  the  white  man's 
culture,  while  Booker  Washington  and  Burghardt 
DuBois  are  either  freaks  or  products  of  the  white 
strain.  It  is  noteworthy,  then,  when  a  man  like 
Dr.  Frissell,  a  trained  educator,  a  graduate  of  Yale, 
and  the  principal  of  the  institution  which  graduated 
Booker  Washington  and  which  is  still  sending  out 
teachers  to  Tuskegee  and  almost  every  other  col 
oured  school,  declares  that  this  expression  of  opin 
ion  of  the  Southern  men  is  not  founded  upon  facts. 
The  Hampton  school  is  manned  almost  exclusively 
by  white  teachers,  and  the  day  of  enthusiastic  mis 
sionary  influence  has  gone  by,  so  that  the  negro  is 
being  studied  there  from  a  purely  professional  edu 
cational  standpoint.  The  officers  and  teachers  of 
the  Hampton  school,  including  many  from  the 
South,  unite  in  the  declaration  that  while  the  per 
centage  of  ignorance  among  the  negroes  in  America 
is  startling,  the  individuals  that  can  be  reached  by 
patient  instruction  respond  with  even  more  readi 
ness  than  densely  ignorant  white  people.  Their  in 
vestigations  are  full  of  hope  for  negroes  and  whites 
alike,  because  they  show  that  with  intelligent  and 
persistent  effort  the  black  people  can  be  raised  to  a 
condition  at  least  approximate  to  that  of  their  white 
neighbours. 


1 86         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

Dr.  Frissell's  philosophical  analysis  of  the  race 
question  is  worthy  of  thoughtful  study  both  North 
and  South.  In  contact  with  the  negro  day  after 
day  and  year  after  year,  he  has  been  able  to  study 
his  living  problem  and  his  character  without  the 
prejudice  of  the  Southern  white  and  without  the 
long  distance  ignorance  of  the  Northern  white. 

"  There  is  no  dead  line  in  negro  education,"  was 
Dr.  Frissell's  first  proposition.  '  That  is,  there  is 
no  limit  to  the  possible  culture  of  the  negro  race  as 
a  whole.  There  is  a  jumping-off  place  in  education 
for  all  races,  white  or  black,  brown  or  yellow.  That 
is  to  say,  there  is  a  place  at  which  a  great  mass  of 
the  race  stops,  and  only  the  individual  goes  beyond 
it.  The  negro  is  undeniably  inferior  to  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  ;  there  can  be  no  question  as  to  that ;  but  the 
inferiority  is  a  matter  of  training,  of  heredity,  of 
association,  and  of  opportunity.  When  we  reach 
the  ordinary  jumping-off  place,  there  is  a  vastly 
greater  number  of  white  individuals  than  of  black 
ones  that  will  leap  over  the  barrier,  but  no  set 
boundary  can  be  placed  to  the  individual's  capacity 
for  culture,  in  either  race. 

"  My  observations  during  years  of  close  contact 
with  the  negro  do  not  lead  me  to  believe  at  all  that 
there  is  any  constitutional  limitation  to  the  mental 
capacity  of  his  race.  On  the  contrary,  there  is  a 
certain  amount  of  receptivity  which  is  quite  marked 
in  the  negro.  Once  you  get  him  interested  he  learns 


What  Kind  of  Education?  187 

readily,  and  within  certain  bounds  progresses  about 
as  well  as  the  average  white  boy  with  the  same  lack 
of  home  training.  Nor  is  there  any  apparent  dif 
ference  between  the  full-blooded  negro  and  the  mu 
latto,  except  so  far  as  the  lighter  coloured  negro 
has  associated  more  with  the  whites,  owing  to  his 
having  been  chosen  for  indoor  employment.  We 
have  for  years  endeavoured  to  trace  the  work  of 
the  full-blooded  negro  as  compared  with  the  mixed 
blood.  I  cannot  see  that  we  have  established  any 
difference  between  them.  On  the  contrary,  our 
valedictorians  run  all  the  way  from  the  blackest 
negro  to  the  lightest  mulatto  who  would  pass  for 
white  anywhere  in  the  Northern  States." 

The  acute  observations  of  Dr.  Frissell  on  slavery 
and  the  results  of  emancipation  would  go  a  long 
way  toward  explaining  some  of  the  problems  which 
have  troubled  the  friends  of  the  negro  and  gratified 
his  enemies.  "  Slavery,"  he  said,  "  had  its  good 
features  and  uses  as  well  as  its  bad  ones.  While 
it  kept  negroes  from  being  educated,  it  also  kept 
them  from  being  criminal.  The  institution  of  slav 
ery  put  all  the  negroes  on  a  dead  level.  The  black 
men  with  criminal  and  vicious  instincts  were  forced 
like  all  the  rest  to  be  industrious.  They  had  no 
opportunity  to  commit  crime,  and  if  they  broke  over 
the  bounds  were  punished  so  relentlessly  that  they 
were  speedily  cowed  into  subjection.  In  this  way, 
slavery  as  a  matter  of  course  prevented  crime  to  a 


1 88         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

great  extent.  When  emancipation  came,  the  nat 
urally  depraved  and  criminal  class  of  negroes  was 
let  loose  and  deprived  of  this  restraining  influence 
of  the  slavery  system.  Such  men  began,  naturally, 
to  confound  license  with  liberty,  and  they  have  dis 
tinctly  degenerated  since  slavery  days. 

"  It  is  this  degenerate,  naturally  criminal  class 
among  the  negroes  which  is  giving  us  all  the  trouble 
to-day.  They  are  not  any  more  numerous  propor 
tionately  than  the  same  class  of  criminals  in  any 
other  race.  They  are  the  single  '  submerged  tenth  ' 
among  the  negroes,  and  are  practically  identical  in 
their  criminal  instincts  and  their  criminal  follow 
ing  with  the  same  class  that  we  find  in  the  white 
slums  of  New  York  and  Chicago.  Their  number 
is  not  growing,  but,  on  the  contrary,  is  being  re 
duced  by  the  advance  of  education  in  the  South. 

"  On  the  other  hand,  we  are  entirely  familiar  with 
the  distinctly  bad  effect  of  slavery,  in  its  involving 
the  denial  of  education  to  the  negro.  In  fact,  slav 
ery  could  not  exist  with  an  educated,  cultured  class 
of  slaves.  So  a  large  proportion  of  the  negroes, 
capable  of  a  fair  measure  of  culture,  were  reduced 
to  the  same  level,  by  slavery,  with  the  incompetent 
and  criminal  class.  Since  emancipation,  this  portion 
of  the  coloured  race,  so  far  as  it  could  be  reached 
by  the  purely  voluntary  educational  methods  that 
the  country  has  been  satisfied  to  adopt,  has  made 
enormous  strides.  Washington,  DuBois,  and  many 


What  Kind  of  Education?  189 

other  negroes  whose  names  have  become  familiar 
to  white  men  are  not  freaks,  but  are  merely  exam 
ples  of  what  education  has  done  and  will  do  for  that 
great  class  of  negroes  whose  natural  mental  activity 
was  reduced  by  slavery  to  the  natural  dead  level. 
Such  negroes  have  advanced  as  no  other  race  in 
the  history  of  the  world  ever  did  advance  in  the 
same  length  of  time.  They  have  had  the  advantage 
of  association  with  cultured  white  men,  which  no 
other  barbaric  race  ever  had.  The  negro  has  shown 
himself  susceptible  of  education,  and  it  is  impossi 
ble  for  us  to  deny  the  fact.  Therefore  the  negroes 
themselves  should  not  lose  hope,  even  if  for  the 
present  they  do  not  secure  all  the  rights  they  con 
sider  themselves  entitled  to. 

"  Furthermore,  we  must  not  lose  sight  of  the  fact 
that  there  was  a  great  middle  class  of  negroes,  mid 
way  between  the  progressive  and  criminal  elements, 
which  was  neither  helped  nor  hindered  by  emanci 
pation.  This  great  intermediate  stratum  is  to-day 
about  where  it  was  a  generation  ago — at  the  dead 
level  to  which  slavery  compressed  the  whole  race. 
It  is  this  element,  which  is  neither  criminal  nor  in 
tellectual,  which  is  merely  inert,  that  we  have  to 
train  into  good  citizenship  by  education.  For  the 
great  mass  of  coloured  people,  work  with  their 
hands  must  continue  to  be  the  only  thing  they  can 
do  successfully.  It  is  in  harmony  with  this  idea 
that  we  have  laid  such  stress  here  in  Hampton  upon 


190         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

agriculture.  Our  academic  course  is  entirely  sub 
sidiary.  It  merely  seeks  to  teach  the  pupil  how  to 
become  a  better  farmer.  In  our  industrial  depart 
ment  we  have  been  laying  more  and  more  stress 
upon  those  trades  which  can  be  practised  more 
easily  in  connection  with  agriculture.  Blacksmiths, 
wheelwrights,  ordinary  carpenters,  and  similar  sim 
ple  mechanics  can  find  ready  occupation  in  farming 
districts. 

"  We  have  deemed  it  best  to  maintain  a  white 
faculty  in  this  school  for  coloured  children  for  a 
variety  of  reasons.  The  most  important,  perhaps,  is 
that  the  negro  for  a  long  time  to  come  must  expect 
to  reap  the  benefit  of  the  culture  and  experience  of 
the  white  man.  If  we  were  to  turn  the  negroes 
loose  to  educate  themselves  exclusively  there  would 
be  but  little  progress.  It  seems  to  be  necessary,  in 
fact,  to  keep  a  constant  stream  of  white  culture 
pouring  in,  if  we  are  to  secure  the  best  results.  We 
find  that  association  with  cultivated  white  teachers 
is  an  excellent  thing  for  the  young  negro  boys  and 
girls.  They  learn  a  great  deal  by  mere  imitation, 
and  they  readily  appreciate  the  fact  that  the  culture 
of  the  white  man,  which  has  made  him  what  he  is, 
is  being  freely  put  at  their  disposal." 

This  question  of  the  influence  of  white  teachers 
upon  coloured  students  can  perhaps  be  best  under 
stood  from  the  fact  that  Booker  Washington  is  a 
graduate  of  Hampton,  and  that  the  Hampton  school 


What  Kind  of  Education?          191 

sends  coloured  teachers  annually  to  Tuskegee  and 
other  negro  institutions,  which  are  exclusively 
manned  by  coloured  men  and  women.  In  truth,  it 
was  General  Armstrong  at  Hampton  who,  on  re 
quest  of  the  people  of  Alabama,  selected  Booker 
Washington  to  organize  the  school  which  has  made 
such  a  vast  success  so  much  farther  South,  under 
the  exclusive  control  of  negro  teachers. 

Dr.  Frissell  went  on  to  speak  of  the  delicate  so 
cial  relations  between  the  white  teachers  and  the 
negro  scholars. 

"  I  wish  our  friends  in  the  South  could  learn 
the  lesson  we  have  learned  here,  which  is  that  when 
the  negro  is  really  cultivated  and  taught  self-respect 
he  prefers  to  keep  to  himself,  to  associate  with  other 
cultivated  negroes,  and  does  not  bother  the  white 
people  at  all.  It  is  not  true  that  the  moment  you  at 
tempt  to  cultivate  the  negro,  you  instil  into  him 
notions  of  social  equality.  Quite  the  contrary  is 
true.  When  we  succeed  in  teaching  the  coloured 
men  and  women  self-respect,  from  that  moment  they 
begin  to  realize  that  there  is  something  in  their  own 
race  to  be  proud  of.  They  seek  the  society  of  col 
oured  people  with  similar  ideals,  and  they  never 
make  the  slightest  attempt  to  cultivate  social  rela 
tions  with  white  people  of  the  vicinity." 


The  Great  Need 

TAKING  the  consensus  of  opinion  among 
those  who  are  striving  for  the  uplift  of  the 
negro,  we  may  arrive  at  the  belief  that  the 
most  practicable  method  of  solving  the  race  problem 
is  the  method  of  education,  of  a  kind  adapted  to  the 
peculiar  temperament  and  needs  of  the  black  race. 
Not  only  justice  and  humanity  call  for  it,  but  ex 
pediency  as  well.  For  apparently  the  only  way  to 
prevent  the  evil  effects  of  the  negro  domination 
which  the  South  dreads  is  to  educate,  educate,  edu 
cate.  The  Southerner  will  scoff  at  this  statement. 
He  takes  the  position  that  the  negro  is  so  nearly 
savage  he  cannot  be  bettered;  he  honestly  believes 
that  the  slightest  tinge  of  education  not  only  de 
stroys  the  usefulness  of  the  negro  as  a  labourer,  but 
injures  him  morally  and  makes  him  a  menace  to 
the  community.  For  the  most  part  the  South  looks 
on  the  negro  merely  as  a  familiar  domestic  animal, 
whose  slothful  ignorance  has  for  generations  been 
a  matter  of  indifference.  But  the  intelligent  South 
erners  who  really  have  the  interests  of  the  negro  at 
heart  are  sincere  in  their  belief  that  the  more  the 

192 


The  Great  Need  193 

black  man  is  educated  the  worse  he  is  off.  Such  a 
theory  is  an  extraordinary  absurdity ;  it  is  even  more 
dangerous  than  the  Northern  notion  that  the  better 
ment  of  the  negro  is  to  be  found  in  the  ballot  box. 
For  in  all  this  the  South  is  manifestly  not  alive 
to  the  situation;  it  is  deficient  in  its  own  civili 
zation;  it  is  a  half  century  behind  the  great 
prosperous  States  of  the  North  in  its  educational 
methods. 

The  little  red  schoolhouse,  unfortunately,  is  not 
a  familiar  sight  in  the  country  districts  in  the  South 
ern  States.  Every  one  knows  that  the  negroes  are 
hopelessly  ignorant  at  the  present  time;  not  every 
one  is  aware  of  the  fact  that  the  means  of  education 
for  white  children  as  well,  in  the  purely  agricultural 
districts  of  the  South,  are  such  as  would  create  a 
scandal  in  Massachusetts,  or  in  New  York,  or  in 
Iowa.  Throughout  the  length  and  breadth  of  the 
South  there  is  a  crying  need  of  awakened  and  en 
lightened  public  opinion  on  the  subject  of  educa 
tion.  Since  the  white  people  have  been  so  backward 
in  educating  their  own  children,  it  is  not  surprising 
that  they  consider  the  education  of  the  negro  worse 
than  superfluous. 

In  view  of  the  things  to  which  the  Southern  peo 
ple  have  had  to  submit,  from  the  changed  conditions 
growing  out  of  the  war,  they  undoubtedly  treat  the 
negro  with  great  fairness.  They  are  much  more 
lenient  toward  his  petty  faults  than  is  the  North; 


194         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

but  on  the  other  hand,  they  seem  to  betray  a  selfish 
interest  in  keeping  him  as  far  as  possible  below  the 
white  race.  It  is  a  rare  thing  to  find  a  Southern 
man  or  woman  who  is  earnestly  engaged  in  better 
ing  the  mental  condition  of  the  coloured  people. 
They  will  look  after  the  negro's  housing  conditions, 
they  will  try  to  teach  him  to  be  economical,  they 
will  give  him  better  clothes,  they  will  provide  him 
with  food,  in  a  queer  kind  of  way  they  will  even 
supervise  his  morals ;  but  they  will  not  educate  him. 
And  though  the  best  fruits  of  Hampton  and  Tuske- 
gee,  of  Howard  and  Atlanta  Universities,  have 
given  the  lie  to  the  mediaeval  theory  that  education 
can  injure  any  class,  and  have  proved  that  the  black- 
man  can  be  educated,  it  yet  seems  impossible  to 
teach  the  Southerner  that  the  kind  of  education 
which  will  convert  an  ignorant  and  frequently 
criminal  immigrant  from  southeast  Europe  into  a 
good  citizen  will  in  the  course  of  time  do  the  same 
thing  for  the  negro. 

If  the  negro  is  lazy,  idle,  childish,  filthy,  im 
prudent,  grossly  immoral,  it  is  largely  because  of 
his  ignorance  of  the  ways  of  the  industrious,  intel 
ligent,  moral  world.  That  ignorance  can  only  be 
remedied  by  the  blessing  of  a  common  school  edu 
cation.  It  seems  probable  that  an  investigation  of 
cases  of  assault  by  negroes  will  show  in  nine  cases 
out  of  ten  that  the  negro  guilty  of  the  terrible 
crime  is  densely  ignorant.  So  far  as  I  know,  there 


The  Great  Need  195 

has  been  no  authenticated  case  where  a  really  edu 
cated  negro,  who  has  been  thrown  into  close  con 
tact  with  educated  white  people,  has  been  guilty  of 
such  a  deed. 

There  is  not  a  single  Southern  State  where  half 
the  negroes  can  read  and  write.  The  percentage 
of  illiteracy  varies;  it  is  lowest  in  Florida  and 
Texas,  highest  in  Louisiana  and  Alabama,  particu 
larly  in  the  sugar  and  cotton  country.  But  the 
census  figures  by  no  means  represent  the  sym 
metrical  ignorance  of  the  Southern  negro.  Tens 
of  thousands  of  the  number  who  claim  to  be  able 
to  read  and  write  can  do  nothing  more  than  spell 
out  their  names,  or  work  over  odd  verses  in  the 
Bible.  There  are  not  ten  per  cent  of  the  agricultural 
negroes  in  the  South  who  possess  even  the  rudi 
ments  of  a  grammar  school  education.  Whenever 
the  negro  can  get  to  the  city  he  is  apt  to  find  a 
school,  but  the  black  people  of  the  rural  districts 
in  the  South  are  almost  wholly  unprovided  with 
means  for  educating  their  children. 

When  I  have  asked  coloured  people  why  they 
wanted  to  get  away  from  the  country,  where  they 
were  well  taken  care  of,  to  the  city,  where  they 
live  in  hovels,  the  invariable  answer  has  been  that 
they  hoped  to  educate  their  children,  and  could  not 
do  so  in  the  country.  This  desire  for  education, 
which  in  many  instances  is  merely  an  ignorant  be 
lief  that  education  brings  freedom  from  work,  is 


196         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

widespread  among  the  coloured  people,  and  what 
ever  may  be  its  cause,  the  sentiment  must  be  placed 
to  the  credit  of  the  race. 

These  black  people  in  their  horrible  ignorance, 
are  a  menace  to  the  prosperity  and  the  peace  of 
the  Southern  States.  They  are,  at  the  same  time, 
a  disgrace  to  the  nation,  because  these  black  people 
are  citizens  of  the  United  States  quite  as  much  as 
they  are  citizens  of  South  Carolina  or  Florida.  It 
is  safe  to  say  they  will  not  be  educated  for  long 
generations  to  come,  unless  the  national  govern 
ment  takes  a  hand  in  the  operation. 

The  South  was  never  any  too  rich,  as  regards  the 
mass  of  its  white  people ;  its  wealth  was  always  con 
centrated  among  the  wealthy  planter  class.  Even 
of  that  wealth  it  was  despoiled  by  the  war.  Its 
fields  were  desolated,  its  plantations  ruined,  its  cap 
ital  dissipated,  and  its  young  men  made  old  before 
their  time,  through  the  hardships  of  soldiery.  To 
day  the  South  is  prosperous,  but  it  has  no  reserve 
capital  of  its  own.  In  fact,  it  is  just  beginning  to 
save.  Its  public  funds  are  small;  its  tax  levies  are 
necessarily  meagre;  its  needs  are  great.  It  will  take 
still  a  generation  or  two  to  make  up  the  vast  mone 
tary  losses  of  the  Civil  War.  In  the  face  of  all 
this,  it  finds  itself  with  a  growing  negro  popula 
tion  of  many  millions.  To  ask  the  South,  unaided, 
to  educate  these  negroes  would  be  a  cruel  injustice; 
and  indeed,  it  is  impossible  to  believe  that  the  few 


The  Great  Need  197 

rich  people  in  the  South  would  tax  themselves  to 
attempt  to  educate  millions  upon  millions  of  the 
blacks  who  were  once  their  slaves.  Any  effort  on 
the  part  of  the  government  to  saddle  the  education 
of  the  black  mass  upon  the  little  white  minority 
would  mean  surely  bankruptcy,  possibly  rebellion. 
And  the  negroes  obviously  cannot  educate  them 
selves;  they  are  hopelessly  poor  and  pitifully  ig 
norant.  It  is  plain  that  there  is  need  for  a  move 
ment  on  the  part  of  the  whole  nation  toward  the 
uplift  and  education  of  the  negro  race. 

The  national  government  should  do  the  educat 
ing.  Why  would  it  not  be  feasible  to  establish  a 
national  educational  fund,  by  the  authority  of  the 
federal  government,  taxing  the  people  of  the  United 
States  as  a  whole,  and  apportioning  the  fund  among 
the  States  on  the  basis  of  illiteracy?  The  fund  need 
not  be  limited  to  white  illiterates  nor  to  negro  il 
literates,  but  could  be  made  general  in  its  scope, 
and  could  be  apportioned  on  the  basis  of  ignorance 
among  men  or  women,  or  both,  of  voting  age. 

If  we  can  stamp  out  yellow  fever  or  smallpox 
by  authority  of  the  national  government,  why  can 
we  not  stamp  out  illiteracy  by  the  same  authority? 
Why  not  inoculate  the  whole  negro  race  with  the 
bacillus  of  education?  Put  a  country  schoolhouse 
within  easy  walking  distance  of  every  group  of 
negro  cabins ;  compel  every  little  darkey  between 
the  ages  of  six  and  sixteen  to  go  to  school  a  pre- 


198         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

scribed  number  of  weeks  in  every  year.  The  result 
would  be  in  a  single  generation  of  time  the  creation 
of  a  new  American  negro  race. 

Though  most  Southern  men  oppose  the  idea  of 
the  negro's  education  as  they  opposed  the  idea  of 
his  freedom,  they  have  all  welcomed  this  sugges 
tion.  They  think  that  if  there  must  be  education 
at  all,  it  is  the  place  of  the  national  government, 
in  all  fairness,  to  attend  to  the  matter.  It  is  hardly 
necessary  to  argue  the  justice  of  such  a  plan.  It  was 
New  England  people  who  brought  the  first  slaves 
to  this  country;  it  was  Northern  bayonets  which 
were  responsible  for  the  shocking  excesses  of  the 
reconstruction  period  in  the  South  immediately  after 
the  war.  If  the  black  man  in  the  South  is  ignorant, 
degraded,  immoral,  improvident,  and  dense,  it  is 
largely  the  fault  of  the  North,  which  struck  the 
shackles  from  his  feet,  and  then  left  him  to  shift 
for  himself,  a  hopeless  foundling  in  an  unfriendly 
world.  Those  were  blind  and  blundering  statesmen, 
who,  having  freed  the  negro,  made  not  the  slightest 
provision  for  his  mental  and  moral  uplifting.  As 
a  matter  of  pure  theory,  they  conferred  upon  him 
the  useless  privilege  of  the  ballot  and  then  left  him 
alone.  From  that  day  to  this  there  has  been  no 
systematic  effort  to  cultivate  the  mental  apparatus 
of  the  Afro-American. 

The  great,  rich,  progressive,  educated  North 
should  at  last  wake  up  to  the  real  necessities  of  the 


The  Great  Need  199 

negro  question.  The  black  man  did  not  come  to 
America  of  himself.  He  is  not  an  immigrant.  He 
was  brought  here  by  force;  and  it  is  only  fair  that 
he  should  be  given  at  least  an  equal  chance  in  the 
community.  It  is  quite  feasible  and  it  is  entirely 
legal  for  the  nation  to  attack  the  terrible  illiteracy 
of  the  South,  and  it  should  do  so  without  regard 
either  for  the  obsolete  opposition  of  the  Southern 
whites  or  for  the  ignorant  indifference  of  the  South 
ern  blacks. 

To  a  certain  extent  the  Southern  people  are  quite 
right  in  their  opposition  to  the  education  of  the 
negro.  The  negro  leaders  who  want  universities 
instead  of  schoolhouses,  treatises  on  logic  and  tables 
of  logarithms  instead  of  spelling  books  and  arith 
metics,  are  but  another  illustration  of  the  familiar 
truth  that  "  a  little  knowledge  is  a  dangerous  thing." 
The  higher  education  of  the  negro  at  the  present 
time  seems  like  an  attempt  to  put  on  the  roof  before 
work  is  begun  on  the  foundation.  Many  Northern 
philanthropists  have  made  a  great  mistake  in  spend 
ing  so  much  money  on  colleges  and  universities  for 
the  coloured  people.  To  a  large  extent  these  insti 
tutions  are  absurd.  Judging  from  my  present  im 
perfect  study  of  the  race  question  in  this  country, 
the  best  plan  would  be  to  abolish  all  but  one  or 
two  of  the  so-called  negro  colleges,  or  at  least  to 
consolidate  them  into  one  or  two  institutions,  suf 
ficient  to  afford  an  outlet  for  such  brilliant,  intelli- 


2OO         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

gent  abnormalities  as  Professor  DuBois  in  Atlanta, 
and  a  few  other  negroes  who  begin  to  approach 
him  in  general  culture. 

What  the  negroes  need  in  the  way  of  literary 
schools  could  be  supplied  by  a  few  institutions  of 
the  ordinary  normal  school  type,  a  kind  of  school 
familiar  throughout  the  best  educated  States  in  the 
North.  A  high  school  training  is  quite  sufficient 
for  ordinary  grammar  school  teachers,  with  a  year 
or  two  of  a  normal  course  as  an  addition.  These 
normal  and  high  schools  are  absolutely  all  that  will 
be  needed  by  the  negroes  for  two  or  three  genera 
tions  to  come,  with  one  or  two  colleges  to  provide 
for  the  aspirations  of  the  few  who  desire  to  pursue 
their  studies  further. 

For  the  great  mass  of  the  negroes  the  need  to 
day  is  for  a  genuine  system  of  primary  schools. 
We  should  teach  the  agricultural  labourer  and  the 
toiler  in  the  city  how  to  read  and  how  to  write, 
how  to  add  two  and  two  and  to  count  to  one  thou 
sand.  We  should  teach  him  how  to  make  change 
and  how  to  read  an  ordinary  contract.  We  should 
teach  him  how  to  write  a  plain,  readable  letter,  how 
to  give  a  receipt,  and  how  to  make  out  a  bill.  Then 
we  should  let  him  alone. 

Side  by  side  with  this  primary  school  and  gram 
mar  school  education  there  should  be  manual  train 
ing  for  the  negro,  of  the  sort  being  done  by  Booker 
Washington  and  by  the  splendid  school  at  Hamp- 


The  Great  Need  201 

ton,  where  that  great  negro  himself  was  educated. 
Combine  this  industrial  education  with  the  grammar 
school  training  indicated,  and  there  will  be  open  to 
the  negro  race  that  opportunity  for  self-respect  and 
capable  service  in  the  world  which  is  now  denied  it. 

Great  care  must  be  taken  to  avoid  the  super-edu 
cation  of  the  negro.  And  this  word  of  warning 
is  especially  directed  to  many  estimable  philan 
thropists,  who  are  willing  to  attach  their  names  to 
colleges,  but  are  slow  to  devote  their  money  to  the 
multiplication  of  humble  little  country  schools.  The 
field  hand  does  not  need  to  know  Latin,  and  he 
may  well  be  ignorant  of  the  chemistry  of  the  soil; 
but  he  does  need  to  know  how  to  use  his  hands, 
how  to  detect  fraud  in  a  labour  contract,  how  to 
scrutinize  his  account  at  a  plantation  store,  and 
above  all,  how  to  write  his  name,  so  that  he  shall 
not  be  made  the  victim  of  his  own  lack  of  knowl 
edge.  Most  of  the  ills  of  the  negro  in  the  South 
to-day  are  brought  about  by  his  own  consuming 
ignorance;  and  it  is  to  be  feared  that  some  of  the 
Southern  opposition  to  his  education  is  born  of 
a  selfish  desire  to  utilize  his  ignorance  for  his  con 
tinued  enslavement. 

Stop  the  coloured  university  just  where  it  is. 
Don't  starve  it ;  but  don't  build  any  more,  and  don't 
increase  the  endowment  of  the  existing  ones  until 
illiteracy  has  been  practically  stamped  out.  Put  £ 
little  red  schoolhouse  within  sight  of  every  planta- 


202         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

tion,  and  give  the  children  time  to  go  to  school. 
Prohibit  employment  of  boys  and  girls  on  the  plan 
tations  except  during  the  summer  months,  and  re 
quire  the  little  darkies  to  put  in  a  certain  number 
of  weeks  in  school.  Multiply  institutions  like  the 
Tuskegee  and  Hampton  industrial  schools,  and  en 
dow  them  with  funds  by  the  national  government. 
Put  one  such  school  in  every  black  county  in  the 
Southern  States.  Teach  reading,  writing,  arith 
metic,  geography,  and  little  else  from  books.  Teach 
blacksmithing  and  the  use  of  the  hammer ;  teach 
reasonable,  sensible  agricultural  methods;  and  then 
turn  the  negro  boy  and  girl  loose,  to  teach  their 
younger  brothers  and  sisters  the  same  thing. 

The  older  generations  of  the  black  people  in  the 
South  cannot  be  reached  to-day,  I  believe,  by  any 
possible  system  of  education ;  but  the  little  children, 
boys  and  girls,  are  actually  hungry  for  schooling. 
They  will  respond  to  the  effort  instantly,  and  in 
fifty  years  the  illiteracy  of  the  black  people  of  the 
South,  which  is  to-day  a  disgrace  to  the  civilization 
of  America,  could  readily  be  wiped  out. 


DEDUCTIONS 


DEDUCTIONS 

IN  summing  up  the  results  of  this  study  of  the 
negro  question,  there  are  a  few  conclusions 
to  be  drawn.  Throughout  the  investigation 
it  has  become  more  and  more  evident  that  what 
was  stated  in  the  beginning  is  true — the  South 
is  too  near  the  negro  and  the  North  too  far  away 
from  him  for  the  position  of  either  to  be  the  true 
one.  There  is,  however,  a  safe  middle  ground 
somewhere,  on  which  the  North  and  South  will  ulti 
mately 'unite  in  the  decision  of  what  is  best  for  the 
negro.  North  and  South  are  both  to  blame  for  the 
present  disagreeable  situation,  and  each  must  modify 
its  point  of  view  to  reach  an  accurate  and  enduring 
settlement.  The  negro  is  a  human  being,  capable 
of  rapid  improvement,  and  destined  in  the  end  to 
participation  in  the  actual  management  of  the  re 
public.  The  South  must  awake  to  this,  and  stop 
thinking  of  the  negro  as  a  despised  bondsman  or 
as  a  mere  domestic  animal.  The  North  must  aban 
don  its  hysterical  attitude ;  it  must  beware  of  making 
matters  worse.  It  must  admit  that  the  negro  as  a 
race  is  not  the  equal  of  the  white  man,  and  that 

205 


206         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

until  he  approximates  the  Caucasian  in  general  racial 
intelligence,  he  cannot  safely  be  entrusted  with  full 
political  power. 

Meanwhile,  in  seeking  for  the  desired  middle 
ground,  the  most  important  thing  to  be  observed, 
in  my  belief,  is  the  necessity  for  extreme  caution  in 
disturbing  present  conditions.  The  negro  in  the 
South  is  out  of  politics  now;  let  him  stay  out  a  bit 
longer.  He  is  not  helped  by  appointment  to  impor 
tant  political  office.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  only 
when  he  is  out  of  politics  that  he  can  hope  to  secure 
the  support  of  his  white  neighbours,  without  which 
his  uplifting  must  be  impossible.  The  ballot  does 
not  help  the  negro  to  secure  work,  nor  to  educate  his 
children.  He  is  much  too  ignorant  to  apply  the 
remedy  of  the  suffrage  to  disperse  the  evil  of  his 
present  condition.  What  the  negro  in  the  South 
most  needs  to-day  is  not  the  ballot  but  the  spelling- 
book. 

The  manifest  future  of  the  negro  race  in  Amer 
ica  lies  along  the  line  of  mental  and  industrial  cul 
ture.  Booker  T.  Washington  is  right,  and  Burg- 
hardt  DuBois  and  T.  Thomas  Fortune  are  danger 
ously  wrong.  The  negro  editors  of  the  North,  who 
write  inflammatory  editorials  which  are  circulated 
among  the  ignorant  plantation  hands,  are  not  the 
real  friends  of  the  black  race.  Booker  T.  Wash 
ington  has  had  to  win  his  victories  devoid  of  the 
sympathy  and  support  of  the  leaders  of  his  own 


Deductions  207 

race.  Yet,  in  some  strange  way,  this  great  negro, 
a  century  ahead  of  his  own  people  in  intellectual 
grasp  of  a  complex  situation,  sees  clearly  that  the 
black  man  must  be  equipped  to  fight  the  real  battles 
of  the  world,  that  he  must  learn  economy  and  fru 
gality,  that  he  must  acquire  property,  and  that  he 
must  make  for  himself  a  place  in  the  community 
from  which  he  cannot  be  dislodged. 

The  South  needs  more  and  better  labour.  The 
industrial  and  commercial  development  of  that  sec 
tion  cannot  proceed  without  a  much  more  abundant 
labour  supply,  which  can  be  secured  only  through 
encouragement  of  white  immigration  from  Europe. 
Iron  and  coal  will  not  come  out  of  the  ground  of 
themselves,  and  the  negro  population  of  the  South 
is  to-day  wholly  insufficient  even  to  till  the  fields. 
But  foreign  white  labour  will  not  go  to  the  South 
until  conditions  there  as  to  the  treatment  of  labour 
ing  men  are  greatly  bettered.  That  can  be  done 
only  by  bettering  the  condition  of  the  negro  him 
self,  so  that  foreign  white  men  will  be  content  to 
work  by  his  side. 

Lynchings,  I  firmly  believe,  are  ephemeral  epi 
sodes,  so  far  as  the  great  race  question  is  con 
cerned.  An  accurate  record  of  all  such  outbreaks 
will  show  beyond  peradventure  that  the  great  ma 
jority  were  not  provoked  by  the  crime  of  assault, 
nor  even  by  insults  to  white  women.  On  the  con 
trary,  in  four  out  of  five  cases  noted  in  the  news- 


2o8         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

papers  it  will  be  discovered  that  negroes  were 
lynched  for  robberies,  arson,  attacks  upon  white 
men,  and  even  for  mere  threats.  There  are,  un 
fortunately,  too  many  cases  of  assault  upon  white 
women  and  children  by  negro  men,  but  the  number 
is  extremely  small  as  compared  with  the  number 
of  lynchings.  It  is  also  suspicious  that  whenever 
a  lynching  party  starts  out  on  a  search  for  a 
criminal,  it  "  generally  gets  some  nigger,"  as 
one  of  my  informants  put  it.  That  is  to  say,  no 
man  can  tell  how  many  times  the  wrong  negro  is 
lynched. 

White  men  are  not  lynched  in  the  South.  What 
is  more,  a  white  man  who  kills  a  white  man  in  the 
South  is  not  ordinarily  punished  by  process  of  law. 
This  is  a  sweeping  statement,  but  the  files  of  South 
ern  newspapers  will  prove  it  true.  The  pistol-carry 
ing  habit  in  the  South  is  a  disgrace  to  that  com 
munity.  It  began  among  the  whites,  and  has  now 
been  generally  adopted  by  the  negroes  themselves. 
The  South  ought  to  put  a  stop  to  it  at  once.  It 
should  punish  the  carrying  of  concealed  weapons 
with  a  term  in  the  penitentiary,  and  it  should  try 
and  hang  murderers  according  to  the  law  and  the 
evidence,  whether  they  be  white  or  black.  If  that 
be  done,  and  if  the  lynchings  are  limited  to  the 
proved  cases  of  outrageous  assault  upon  women,  the 
necessity  for  these  illegal  murders  will  soon  disap 
pear,  as  the  process  of  education  tends  to  eliminate 


Deductions  209 

the  one  great  crime  which  has  been  made  the  justi 
fication  for  lynchings.  When  the  South  improves 
its  general  administration  of  criminal  law,  and  ap 
plies  it  equally  to  white  and  black,  lynchings  them 
selves  will  cease  as  merely  ephemeral  manifesta 
tions  of  a  disjointed  race  episode. 

A  few  brief  suggestions,  serving  to  sum  up  the 
policy  of  the  nation  toward  the  negro  and  his  needs 
may  not  be  out  of  place  in  conclusion. 

Deprive  the  negro  of  his  commanding  position 
as  the  sole  labour  supply  of  the  South.  Dignify  the 
condition  of  labour  by  elevating  the  condition  of 
the  negro,  and  thus  encourage  the  immigration  of 
white  labour,  to  relieve  the  congestion,  to  develop 
Southern  industries,  and  to  civilize  the  negro  by 
contact. 

Educate  the  negro  at  the  expense  of  the  whole 
nation.  Put  a  little  black  schoolhouse  within  sound 
of  every  plantation  bell. 

Stop  public  negro  education  with  the  grammar 
school,  and  let  all  higher  education  be  at  private 
expense. 

Plant  industrial  schools  of  the  Tuskegee  and 
Hampton  type  in  every  black  county  of  the 
South. 

Keep  the  negro  out  of  politics  in  the  South  until 
the  average  of  the  race  is  at  least  equal  to  that  of 
the  European  immigrant  of  to-day.  Do  this  by  any 
means  satisfactory  to  the  rough  and  ready  Anglo- 


2io         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

Saxon  mind,  and  patch  up  the  constitution  after- 
Avar  ds. 

Lynch  no  negro  for  anything  except  crimes 
against  women,  and  then  be  sure  you  have  the  right 
negro. 

Hang  a  few  white  men  for  murder  now  and  then, 
just  as  an  example  to  their  poor  black  neighbours. 

Sew  up  every  pistol  pocket  south  of  Mason  and 
Dixon's  line. 

Chain  up  all  anarchistic  negro  editors  north 
of  that  line,  and  put  in  comfortable  asylums 
Southern  statesmen  who  oppose  the  education  of 
the  negro. 

Teach  the  negro  as  a  man,  and  not  as  a  baby, 
punish  him  when  he  does  wrong,  reward  him  for 
right  living,  but  above  all  teach  him  morality  and 
justice  by  the  example  of  the  white  man. 

Stop  whining  about  the  immorality  of  the  negro 
until  there  are  to  be  seen  no  more  mulatto  children 
with  white  fathers. 

Remember  always  that  the  negro  did  not  come  to 
America  of  his  own  accord,  that  he  has  but  recently 
escaped  from  the  degradation  of  slavery,  and  that 
his  vices  and  his  follies,  harassing  though  they  be, 
certainly  can  be  removed  by  wise  educational  meth 
ods,  adapted  to  his  condition,  and  persisted  in  for 
years  and  for  generations. 

Do  these  things  to-day,  and  to-morrow  the  race 
question  will  disappear. 


Deductions  211 

The  negro  himself,  meanwhile,  must  be  patient. 
As  a  race  he  is  hot  yet  able  to  decide  what  is  best 
for  him.  He  is  a  babe  in  arms,  so  far  as  the  civilized 
world  is  concerned,  and  if  he  does  not  obey,  it  is 
likely  the  big  world  will  compel  him  to  do  so  by 
the  exercise  of  unpleasant  force.  In  a  word,  he  is 
not  likely  to  have  much  voice  in  the  settlement  of 
the  race  question  for  some  time  to  come.  The  tail 
seldom  does  much  toward  guiding  the  footsteps  of 
the  dog.  The  Indian  was  exterminated  because  he 
resisted  the  irresistible.  Though  the  negro  is  as 
ignorant  as  ever  the  Indian  was,  he  is  by  nature 
tractable,  so  that  he  is  destined  to  a  slow  process 
of  improvement  rather  than  a  rapid  one  of  anni 
hilation. 

In  conclusion,  the  country  must  not  forget  the 
complications  of  the  race  question.  There  are  is 
sues  at  stake  involving  politics,  education,  labour, 
immigration,  industrial  and  agricultural  necessities, 
all  of  which  must  be  settled  long  before  we  reach 
the  great  issue  of  possible  social  equality,  which, 
after  all,  for  the  present  century,  is  only  the  fabric 
of  a  dream. 

Finally,  let  me  reiterate  the  declaration  that  the 
only  permanent  settlement  of  the  race  question  in 
America  must  come  through  the  education  of  the 
negro;  that  this  must  proceed  from  the  ground  up 
through  the  district  school,  and  not  through  the  uni 
versity;  and  that  the  people  of  New  York,  and  of 


212         The  Negro  and  His  Needs 

Illinois,  and  of  Oregon  are  quite  as  responsible  for 
negro  illiteracy  as  the  people  of  Georgia  and 
Arkansas. 

The  uplifting  of  the  negro  must  be  done  by  the 
nation. 


THE   END 


wvis 

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Patterson,  R.A. 

The  Negro  and 
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